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EDITED BY JOHN MOELEY 



DANIEL DEFOE 



BY 



WILLIAM MINTO 



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NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 



FRANKLIN SQUARE 



1879 



PREFACE. 

There are three considerable biographies of Defoe — the 
first, by George Chalmers, published in 1786 ; the second 
by Walter Wilson, published in 1830 ; the third, by Wil- 
liam Lee, published in 1869. All three are thorough and 
painstaking works, justified by independent research and 
discovery. The labour of research in the case of an au- 
thor supposed to have written some two hundred and fifty 
separate books and pamphlets, very few of them under 
his own name, is naturally enormous ; and when it is done, 
the results are open to endless dispute. Probably two 
men could not be found who would read through the 
vast mass of contemporary anonymous and pseudonymous 
print, and agree upon a complete list of Defoe's writings. 
Fortunately, however, for those who wish to get a clear 
idea of his life and character, the identification is not pure 
guess-work on internal evidence. He put his own name 
or initials to some of his productions, and treated the au- 
thorship of others as open secrets. Enough is ascertained 
as his to provide us with the means for a complete under- 
standing of his opinions and his conduct. It is Defoe's 



vi PREFACE. 

misfortune that his biographers on the large scale have 
occupied themselves too much with subordinate details, 
and have been misled from a true appreciation of his 
main lines of thought and action by religious, political, 
and hero-worshipping bias. For the following sketch, 
taking Mr. Lee's elaborate work as my chronological 
guide, I have read such of Defoe's undoubted writings as 
are accessible in the Library of the British Museum — 
there is no complete collection, I believe, in existence — 
and endeavoured to connect them and him with the his- 
tory of the time. 

W. M. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

DEFOE'S youth and early pursuits 1 



CHAPTER II. 
king William's adjutant 13 

CHAPTER III. 

A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 30 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE .... 51 

CHAPTER V. 

THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION 62 

CHAPTER VI. 

DR. SACHEVERELL, AND THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT . 73 



viii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE 

DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES 103 

CHAPTER VIII. 

LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS 115 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE . . . 130 

CHAPTER X. 

HIS MYSTERIOUS END 155 



DANIEL DEFOE. 

CHAPTER I. 

defoe's youth and early pursuits. 

The life of a man of letters is not as a rule eventful. 
It may be rich in spiritual experiences, but it seldom is 
rich in active adventure. We ask his biographer to tell 
us what were his habits of composition, how he talked, 
how he bore himself in the discharge of his duties to his 
family, his neighbors, and himself ; what were his beliefs 
on the great questions that concern humanity. We de- 
sire to know what he said and wrote, not what he did be- 
yond the study and the domestic or the social circle. The 
chief external facts in his career are the dates of the pub- 
lication of his successive books. 

Daniel Defoe is an exception to this rule. He was a 
man of action as well as a man of letters. The writing 
of the books which have given him immortality was little 
more than an accident in his career, a comparatively tri- 
fling and casual item in the total expenditure of his many- 
sided energy. He was nearly sixty when he wrote Robin- 
son Crusoe. Before that event he had been a rebel, a mer- 



2 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

chant, a manufacturer, a writer of popular satires in verse, 
a bankrupt; had acted as secretary to a public commis- 
sion, been employed in secret services by five successive 
Administrations, written innumerable pamphlets, and edit- 
ed more than one newspaper. He had led, in fact, as ad- 
venturous a life as any of his own heroes, and had met 
quickly succeeding difficulties with equally ready and fer- 
tile ingenuity. 

For many of the incidents in Defoe's life we are indebt- 
ed to himself. He had all the vaingloriousness of exuber- 
ant vitality, and was animated in the recital of his own 
adventures. Scattered throughout his various works are 
the materials for a tolerably complete autobiography. This 
is in one respect an advantage for any one who attempts 
to give an account of his life. But it has a counterbalanc- 
ing disadvantage in the circumstance that there is grave 
reason to doubt his veracity. Defoe was a great story-tell- 
er in more senses than one. We can hardly believe a 
word that he says about himself without independent con- 
firmation. 

Defoe was born in London, in 1661. It is a character- 
istic circumstance that his name i§ not his own, except in 
the sense that it was assumed by himself. The name of 
his father, who was a butcher in the parish of St. Giles, 
Cripplegate, was Foe. His grandfather was a Northamp- 
tonshire yeoman. In his True Born Englishman, Defoe 
spoke very contemptuously of families that professed to 
have come over with "the Norman bastard," defying them 
to prove whether their ancestors were drummers or col- 
onels; but apparently he was not above the vanity of 
making the world believe that he himself was of Norman- 
French origin. Yet such was the restless energy of the 
man that he could not leave even his adopted name alone ; 



l] DEFOE'S YOUTH AND EARLY PURSUITS. 3 

he seems to have been about forty when he first changed 
his signature "D. Foe" into the surname of "Defoe;" but 
his patient biographer, Mr. Lee, has found several later in- 
stances of his subscribing himself "D. Foe," " D. F.," and 
"De Foe" in alternation with the "Daniel De Foe," or 
" Daniel Defoe," which has become his accepted name in 
literature. 

In middle age, when Defoe was taunted with his want 
of learning, he retorted that if he was a blockhead it was 
not the fault of his father, who had "spared nothing in his 
education that might qualify him to match the accurate 
Dr. Browne, or the learned Observator." His father w r as 
a Nonconformist, a member of the congregation of Dr. 
Annesley, and the son was originally intended for the Dis- 
senting ministry. "It was his disaster," he said after- 
wards, " first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart 
from, that sacred employ." He was placed at an academy 
for the training of ministers at the age, it is supposed, of 
about fourteen, and probably remained there for the full 
course of five years. He has himself explained why, when 
his training was completed, he did not proceed to the of- 
fice of the pulpit, but changed his views and resolved to 
eng;ao;e in business as a hose-merchant. The sum of the 
explanation is that the ministry seemed to him at that 
time to be neither honourable, agreeable, nor profitable. 
It was degraded, he thought, by the entrance of men who 
had neither physical nor intellectual qualification for it, 
who had received out of a denominational fund only such 
an education as made them pedants rather than Christian 
gentlemen of high learning, and who had consequently to 
submit to shameful and degrading practices in their efforts 
to obtain congregations and subsistence. Besides, the be- 
haviour of congregations to their ministers, who were de- 



4 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

pendent, was often objectionable and un-Christian. And 
finally, far-flown birds having fine feathers, the prizes of 
the ministry in London were generally given to strangers, 
" eminent ministers called from all parts of England," 
some even from Scotland, finding acceptance in the me- 
tropolis before having received any formal ordination. 

Though the education of his " fund-bred" companions, 
as he calls them, at Mr. Morton's Academy in Newington 
Green, was such as to excite Defoe's contempt, he bears 
testimony to Mr. Morton's excellence as a teacher, and in- 
stances the names of several pupils who did credit to his 
labours. In one respect Mr. Morton's system was better 
than that which then prevailed at the Universities; all 
dissertations were written and all disputations held in 
English ; and hence it resulted, Defoe says, that his pupils, 
though they were " not destitute in the languages," were 
"made masters of the English tongue, and more of them 
excelled in that particular than of any school at that time." 
Whether Defoe obtained at JSTewington the rudiments of 
all the learning which he afterwards claimed to be pos- 
sessed of, we do not know ; but the taunt frequently lev- 
elled at him by University men of being an " illiterate fel- 
low " and no scholar, was one that he bitterly resented, 
and that drew from him many protestations and retorts. 
In 1705, he angrily challenged John Tutchin "to translate 
with him any Latin, French, or Italian author, and after 
that to retranslate them crosswise for twenty pounds each 
book ;" and he replied to Swift, who had spoken of him 
scornfully as " an illiterate fellow, whose name I forget," 
that " he had been in his time pretty well master of five 
languages, and had not lost them yet, though he wrote no 
bill at his door, nor set Latin quotations on the front of 
the Review" To the end of his days Defoe could not 



l] DEFOE'S YOUTH AN T D EARLY PURSUITS. 5 

forget this taunt of want of learning. In one of the 
papers in Applebee's Journal identified by Mr. Lee (below, 
Chapter VIII. ), he discussed what is to be understood by 
"learning," and drew the following sketch of his own 
attainments : — 

"I remember an Author in the World some years ago, 
who was generally upbraided with Ignorance, and called an 
' Illiterate Fellow,' by some of the Beau-Monde of the last 
Age. . . . 

" I happened to come into this Person's Study once, and I 
found him busy translating a Description of the Course of 
the River Boristhenes, out of Bleavls Geography, written in 
Spanish. Another Time I found him translating some Latin 
Paragraphs out of Leiibinitz Theatri Cometici,hemg a learned 
Discourse upon Comets ; and that I might see whether it w T as 
genuine, I looked on some part of it that he had finished, 
and found by it that he understood the Latin very well, and 
had perfectly taken the sense of that difficult Author. In 
short, I found he understood the Latin, the Spanish, the Ital- 
ian, &n& could read the Greek, and I knew before that he 
spoke French fluently — yet this Man teas no Scholar. 

"As to Science, on another Occasion, I heard him dispute 
(in such a manner as surprised me) upon the motions of the 
Heavenly Bodies, the Distance, Magnitude, Revolutions, and 
especially the Influences of the Planets, the Nature and prob- 
able Revolutions of Comets, the excellency of the New Phi- 
losophy, and the like ; hut this Man was no Scholar. 

" In Geography and History he had all the "World at his 
Finger's ends. He talked of the most distant Countries with 
an inimitable Exactness ; and changing from one Place to 
another, the Company thought, of every Place or Country he 
named, that certainly he must have been born there. He 
knew not only where every Thing was, but what everybody 
did in every Part of the World ; I mean, what Businesses, 
what Trade, what Manufacture, was carrying on in every Part 



6 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

of the World ; and had the History of almost all the Nations 
of the World in his Head— yet this Man was no Scholar. 

" This put me upon wondering, ever so long ago, what this 
strange Thing called a Man of Learning was, and what is it 
that constitutes a Scholar f For, said i", here's a man speaks 
five Languages and reads the Sixth, is a master of Astron- 
omy, Geography, History, and abundance of other useful 
Knowledge (which I do not mention, that you may not guess 
at the Man, who is too Modest to desire it), and yet, they say 
this Man is no Scholar" 

How much of this learning Defoe acquired at school, 
and how much he picked up afterwards under the press- 
ure of the necessities of his business, it is impossible to 
determine, but at any rate it was at least as good a qualifi- 
cation for writing on public affairs as the more limited 
and accurate scholarship of his academic rivals. What- 
ever may have been the extent of his knowledge when he 
passed from Mr. Morton's tuition, qualified but no longer 
willing to become a Dissenting preacher, he did not allow 
it to rust unused ; he at once mobilised his forces for ac- 
tive service. They were keen politicians, naturally, at the 
Newington Academy, and the times furnished ample ma- 
terials for their discussions. As Nonconformists they 
were very closely affected by the struggle between Charles 
II. and the defenders of Protestantism and popular liber- 
ties. What part Defoe took in the excitement of the 
closing -years of the reign of Charles must be matter of 
conjecture, but there can be little doubt that he was active 
on the popular side. He had but one difference then, he 
afterwards said in one of his tracts, with his party. He 
would not join them in wishing for the success of the 
Turks in besieging Vienna, because, though the Austrians 
were Papists, and though the Turks were ostensibly on the 



i.] DEFOE'S YOUTH AND EARLY PURSUITS. 1 

side of the Hungarian reformers "whom the Austrian Gov- 
ernment had persecuted, he had read the history of the 
Turks and could not pray for their victory over Christians 
of any denomination. " Though then but a young man, 
and a younger author" (this was in 1683), "he opposed 
it and wrote against it, which was taken very unkindly in- 
deed." From these words it would seem that Defoe had 
thus early begun to write pamphlets on questions of the 
hour. As he was on the weaker side, and any writing 
might have cost him his life, it is probable that he did not 
put his name to any of these tracts ; none of them have 
been identified ; but his youth was strangely unlike his 
mature manhood if he was not justified in speaking of 
himself as having been then an " author." Nor was he 
content merely with writing. It would have been little 
short of a miracle if his restless energy had allowed him 
to lie quiet while the air was thick with political intrigue. 
We may be sure that he had a voice in some of the secret 
associations in which plans were discussed of armed re- 
sistance to the tyranny of the King. We have his own 
word for it that he took part in the Duke of Monmouth's 
rising, when the whips of Charles were exchanged for the 
scorpions of James. He boasted of this when it became 
safe to do so, and the truth of the boast derives incidental 
confirmation from the fact that the names of three of his 
fellow-students at Xewington appear in the list of the vic- 
tims of Jeffreys and Kirke. 

Escaping the keen hunt that was made for all partici- 
pators in the rebellion, Defoe, towards the close of 1685, 
began business as a hosier or hose -factor in Freeman's 
Court, Corn hill. The precise nature of his trade has been 
disputed; and it does not particularly concern us here. 
When taunted afterwards with having been apprentice to 



8 DAMEL DEFOE. [chap. 

a hosier, he indignantly denied the fact, and explained that 
though he had been a trader in hosiery he had never been 
a shopkeeper. A passing illustration in his Essay on Proj- 
ects, drawn from his own experience, shows that he im- 
ported goods in the course of his business from abroad ; 
he speaks of sometimes having paid more in insurance pre- 
mios than lie had cleared by a voyage. From a story 
which he tells in his Complete English Tradesman, recall- 
ing the cleverness with which he defeated an attempt to 
outwit him about a consignment of brandy, we learn that 
his business sometimes took him to Spain. This is near- 
ly all that we know about his first adventure in trade, ex- 
cept that after seven years, in 1692, he had to flee from 
his creditors. He hints in one of his Reviews that this 
misfortune was brought about by the frauds of swindlers, 
and it deserves to be recorded that he made the honourable 
boast that he afterwards paid off his obligations. The 
truth of the boast is independently confirmed by the ad- 
mission of a controversial enemy, that very Tutchin whom 
he challenged to translate Latin with him. That Defoe 
should have referred so little to his own experience in the 
Complete English Tradesman, a series of Familiar Letters 
which he published late in life " for the instruction of our 
Inland Tradesmen, and especially of Young Beginners," is 
accounted for when we observe the class of persons to 
w T hom the letters were addressed. He distinguishes with 
his usual clearness between the different ranks of those em- 
ployed in the production and exchange of goods, and inti- 
mates that his advice is not intended for the highest grade 
of traders, the merchants, whom he defines by what he calls 
the vulgar expression, as being " such as trade beyond sea." 
Although he was eloquent in many books and pamphlets 
in upholding the dignity of trade, and lost no opportunity 



i.] DEFOE'S YOUTH AND EARLY PURSUITS. 9 

of scoffing at pretentious gentility, he never allows us to 
forget that this was the grade to which he himself be- 
longed, and addresses the petty trader from a certain alti- 
tude. He speaks in the preface to the Complete Trades- 
man of unfortunate creatures who have blown themselves 
up in trade, whether " for want of wit or from too much 
wit ;" but lest he should be supposed to allude to his own 
misfortunes, he does not say that he miscarried himself, but 
that he " had seen in a few years' experience many young 
tradesmen miscarry." At the same time it is fair to con- 
jecture that when Defoe warns the young tradesman against 
fancying himself a politician or a man of letters, running off 
to the coffee-house when he ought to be behind the count- 
er, and reading Virgil and Horace when he should be busy 
over his journal and his ledger, he was glancing at some of 
the causes which conduced to his own failure as a mer- 
chant. And when he cautions the beginner against going 
too fast, and holds up to him as a type and exemplar the 
carrier's waggon, which " keeps wagging and always- goes 
on," and " as softly as it goes " can yet in time go far, we 
may be sure that he was thinking of the over-rashness with 
which he had himself embarked in speculation. 

There can be no doubt that eager and active as Defoe 
was in his trading enterprises, he was not so wrapt up 
in them as to be an unconcerned spectator of the intense 
political life of the time. When King James aimed a 
blow at the Church of England by removing the religious 
disabilities of all dissenters, Protestant and Catholic, in 
his Declaration of Indulgence, some of Defoe's co-religion- 
ists were ready to catch at the boon without thinking of 
its consequences. He differed from them, he afterwards 
stated, and " as he used to say that he had rather the 
Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in 



10 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

Hungaria, than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin 
both Protestants and Papists by overrunning Germany," 
so now " he told the Dissenters he had rather the Church 
of England should pull our clothes off by fines and for- 
feitures, than the Papists should fall both upon the Church 
and the Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and fag- 
got." He probably embodied these conclusions of his 
vigorous common sense in a pamphlet, though no pam- 
phlet on the subject known for certain to be his has been 
preserved. Mr. Lee is over-rash in identifying as Defoe's 
a quarto sheet of that date entitled "A Letter containing 
some Beilections on His Majesty's declaration for Liberty 
of Conscience." Defoe may have written many pamphlets 
on the stirring events of the time, which have not come 
down to us. It may have been then that he acquired, or 
made a valuable possession by practice, that marvellous 
facility with his pen which stood him in such stead in 
after-life. It would be no wonder if he wrote dozens of 
pamphlets, every one of which disappeared. The pam- 
phlet then occupied the place of the newspaper leading arti- 
cle. The newspapers of the time were veritable chronicles 
of news, and not organs of opinion. The expression of 
opinion was not then associated with the dissemination of 
facts and rumours. A man who wished to influence public 
opinion wrote a pamphlet, small or large, a single leaf or a 
tract of a few pages, and had it hawked about the streets 
and sold in the bookshops. These pamphlets issued from 
the press in swarms, were thrown aside when read, and 
hardly preserved except by accident. That Defoe, if he 
wrote any or many, should not have reprinted them when 
fifteen years afterwards he published a collection of his 
works, is intelligible ; he republished only such of his 
tracts as had not lost their practical interest. If, however, 



i.J DEFOE'S YOUTH AXD EARLY PURSUITS. 11 

we indulge in the fancy, warranted so far by his describing 
himself as having been a young " author" in 1683, that 
Defoe took an active part in polemical literature under 
Charles and James, we must remember that the censorship 
of the press was then active, and that Defoe must have 
published under greater disadvantages than those who 
wrote on the side of the Court. 

At the Revolution, in 1688, Defoe lost no time in making 
his adhesion to the new monarch conspicuous. He was, 
according to Oldmixon, one of " a royal regiment of vol- 
unteer horse, made up of the chief citizens, who, being 
gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the 
Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and at- 
tended their Majesties from Whitehall " to a banquet given 
by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City. Three 
years afterwards, on the occasion of the Jacobite plot in 
which Lord Preston was the leading figure, he published 
the first pamphlet that is known for certain to be his. It 
is in verse, and is entitled A JYeio Discovery of an Old 
Intrigue, a Satire levelled at Treachery and Ambition. In 
the preface, the author said that " he had never drawn his 
pen before," and that he would never write again unless 
this effort produced a visible reformation. If we take this 
literally, we must suppose that his claim to have been an 
author eighteen years before had its origin in his fitful 
vanity. The literary merits of the satire, when we com- 
pare it with the powerful verse of Dryden's Absalom and 
Achitophel, to which he refers in the exordium, are not 
great. Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a 
catalogue of the Poets in one of his later pieces assigned 
himself the special province of " lampoon." He possibly 
believed that his clever doggerel was a better title to im- 
mortality than Robinson Crusoe. The immediate popular 



12 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. i. 

effect of his satires gave some encouragement to this be- 
lief, but they are comparatively dull reading for posterity. 
The clever hits at living City functionaries, indicated by 
their initials and nicknames, the rough ridicule and the 
biting innuendo, were telling in their day, but the lampoons 
have perished with their objects. The looal celebrity of 
Sir Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the 
Tailor, has vanished, and Defoe's hurried and formless 
lines, incisive as their vivid force must have been, are not 
redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the few 
bright epigrams with which they are besprinkled. 



CHAPTER II. 

king William's adjutant. 

Defoe's first business catastrophe happened about 1692. 
He is said to have temporarily absconded, and to have 
parleyed with his creditors from a distance till they agreed 
to accept a composition. Bristol is named as having been 
his place of refuge, and there is a story that he was known 
there as the Sunday Gentleman, because he appeared on 
that day, and that day only, in fashionable attire, being 
kept indoors during the rest of the week by fear of the 
bailiffs. But he was of too buoyant a temperament to sink 
under his misfortune from the sense of having brought 
it on himself, and the cloud soon passed aw T ay. A man 
so fertile in expedients, and ready, according to his own 
ideal of a thoroughbred trader, to turn himself to any- 
thing, could not long remain unemployed. He had vari- 
ous business offers, and among others an invitation from 
some merchants to settle at Cadiz as a commission agent, 
" with offers of very good commissions." But Providence, 
he tells us, and, w r e may add, a shrewd confidence in 
his own powers, "placed a secret aversion in his mind 
to quitting England upon any account, and made him re- 
fuse the best offers of that kind." He stayed at home, 
" to be concerned with some eminent persons in proposing 



U DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

ways and means to the Government for raising money to 
supply the occasions of the war then newly begun." He 
also wrote a vigorous and loyal pamphlet, entitled, The 
Englishman's Choice and True Interest: in the vigorous 
prosecution of the ivar against France, and serving K. 
William and, Q. Mary, and acknowledging their right 
As a reward for his literary or his financial services, or for 
both, he was appointed, "without the least application" 
of his own, Accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass 
Duty, and held this post till the duty was abolished in 
1699. 

From 1694 to the end of William's reign was the most 
prosperous and honourable period in Defoe's life. His ser- 
vices to the Government did not absorb the whole of his 
restless energy. He still had time for private enterprise, 
and started a manufactory of bricks and pantiles at Til- 
bury, where, Mr. Lee says, judging from fragments recently 
dug up, he made good sound sonorous bricks, although ac- 
cording to another authority such a thing was impossible 
out of any material existing in the neighbourhood. Any- 
how, Defoe prospered, and set up a coach and a pleasure- 
boat. Nor must we forget what is so much to his honour, 
that he set himself to pay his creditors in full, voluntarily 
disregarding the composition which they had accepted. 
In 1705 he was able to boast that he had reduced his 
debts in spite of many difficulties from 17,000/. to 5,000/., 
but these sums included liabilities resulting from the fail- 
ure of his pantile factory. 

Defoe's first conspicuous literary service to King Wil- 
liam, after he obtained Government employment, was a 
pamphlet on the question of a Standing Army raised after 
the Peace of Eyswick in 1697. This Pen and Ink War, 
as he calls it, which followed close on the heels of the 



il] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 15 

great European struggle, had been raging for some time 
before Defoe took the field. Hosts of writers had ap- 
peared to endanger the permanence of the triumph of 
William's arms and diplomacy by demanding the disband- 
ment of his tried troops, as being a menace to domestic 
liberties. Their arguments had been encountered by no 
less zealous champions of the King's cause. The battle, in 
fact, had been won when Defoe issued his Argument show- 
ing that a Standing Army, with consent of Parliament, is 
not inconsistent with a Free Government. He was able to 
boast in his preface that "if books and writings would 
not, God be thanked the Parliament would confute" his 
adversaries. Nevertheless, though coming late in the day, 
Defoe's pamphlet was widely read, and must have helped 
to consolidate the victory. 

Thus late in life did Defoe lay the first stone of his lit- 
erary reputation. He was now in tho thirty-eighth year 
of his age, his controversial genius in full vigour, and his 
mastery of language complete. None of his subsequent 
tracts surpass this as a piece of trenchant and persuasive 
reasoning. It shows at their very highest his marvellous 
powers of combining constructive with destructive criti- 
cism. He dashes into the lists with good-humoured con- 
fidence, bearing the banner of clear common sense, and 
disclaiming sympathy with extreme persons of either side. 
He puts his case with direct and plausible force, address- 
ing his readers vivaciously as plain people like himself, 
among whom as reasonable men there cannot be two opin- 
ions. He cuts rival arguments to pieces with dexterous 
strokes, representing them as the confused reasoning of 
well-meaning but dull intellects, and dances with lively 
mockery on the fragments. If the authors of such argu- 
ments knew their own minds, they would be entirely on 



10 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

his side. He echoes the pet prejudices of his readers as 
the props and mainstays of his thesis, and boldly laughs 
away misgivings of which they are likely to be half 
ashamed. He makes no parade of logic; he is only a 
plain freeholder like the mass whom he addresses, though 
he knows twenty times as much as many writers of more 
pretension. He never appeals to passion or imagination ; 
what he strives to enlist on his side is homely self-interest, 
and the ordinary sense of what is right and reasonable. 
There is little regularity of method in the development 
of his argument ; that he leaves to more anxious and elab- 
orate masters of style. For himself he is content to start 
from a bold and clear statement of his own opinion, and 
proceeds buoyantly and discursively to engage and scatter 
his enemies as they turn up, without the least fear of be- 
ing able to fight his way back to his original base. He 
wrote for a class to whom a prolonged intellectual opera- 
tion, however comprehensive and complete, was distasteful. 
To persuade the mass of the freeholders was his object, 
and for such an object there are no political tracts in the 
language at all comparable to Defoe's. He bears some re- 
semblance to Cobbett, but he had none of Cobbett's bru- 
tality ; bis faculties were more adroit, and his range of 
vision infinitely wider. Cobbett was a demagogue, Defoe 
a popular statesman. The one was qualified to lead the 
people, the other to guide them. Cobbett is contained in 
Defoe as the less is contained in the greater. 

King William obtained a standing army from Parlia- 
ment, but not so large an army as he wished, and it was 
soon afterwards still further reduced. Meantime, Defoe, 
employed his pen in promoting objects which were dear 
to the King's heart. His Essay on Projects — which " re- 
late to Civil Polity as well as matters of negoce " — was 



il] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 17 

calculated, in so far as it advocated joint-stock enterprise, 
to advance one of the objects of the statesmen of the Rev- 
olution, the committal of the moneyed classes to the es- 
tablished Government, and against a dynasty which might 
plausibly be mistrusted of respect for visible accumulations 
of private wealth. Defoe's projects were of an extremely 
varied kind. The classification was not strict. His spir- 
ited definition of the word " projects " included Noah's 
Ark and the Tower of Babel, as well as Captain Phipps's 
scheme for raising the wreck of a Spanish ship laden with 
silver. He is sometimes credited with remarkable shrewd- 
ness in having anticipated in this Essay some of the great- 
est public improvements of modern times — the protection 
of seamen, the higher education of women, the establish- 
ment of banks and benefit societies, the construction of 
highways. But it is not historically accurate to give him 
the whole credit of these conceptions. Most of them were 
floating about- at the time, so much so that he had to de- 
fend himself against a charge of plagiarism, and few of 
them have been carried out in accordance with the essen- 
tial features of his plans. One remarkable circumstance 
in Defoe's projects, which we may attribute either to his 
own natural bent or to his compliance with the King's 
humour, is the extent to which he advocated Government 
interference. He proposed, for example, an income-tax, 
and the appointment of a commission who should travel 
through the country and ascertain by inquiry that the tax 
was not evaded. In making this proposal he shows an ac- 
quaintance with private incomes in the City, which raises 
some suspicion as to the capacity in which he was "asso- 
ciated with certain eminent persons in proposing ways and 
means to the Government." In his article on Banks, he 
expresses himself dissatisfied that the Government did not 

2 






18 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

fix a maximum rate of interest for the loans made by char- 
tered banks ; they were otherwise, he complained, of no 
assistance to the poor trader, who might as well go to the 
goldsmiths as before. His Highways project was a scheme 
for making national highways on a scale worthy of Baron 
Haussmann. There is more fervid imagination and dar- 
ing ingenuity than business talent in Defoe's essay ; if his 
trading speculations were conducted with equal rashness, 
it is not difficult to understand their failure. The most 
notable of them are the schemes of a dictator, rather than 
of the adviser of a free Government. The essay is chiefly 
interesting as a monument of Defoe's marvellous force of 
mind, and strange mixture of steady sense with inconti- 
nent flightiness. There are ebullient sallies in it which we 
generally find only in the productions of madmen and char- 
latans, and yet it abounds in suggestions which statesmen 
might profitably have set themselves with due adaptations 
to carry into effect. The Essay on Projects might alone 
be adduced in proof of Defoe's title to genius. 

One of the first projects to which the Government of 
the Kevolution addressed itself was the reformation of 
manners — a purpose at once commendable in itself and 
politically useful as distinguishing the new Government 
from the old. Even while the King was absent in Ire- 
land at the beginning of his reign, the Queen issued a let- 
ter calling upon all justices of the peace and other servants 
of the Crown to exert themselves in suppressing the lux- 
uriant growth of vice, which had been fostered by the ex- 
ample of the Court of Charles. On the conclusion of the 
war in 1697, William issued a most elaborate proclama- 
tion to the same erf ect, and an address was voted by Par- 
liament, asking his Majesty to see that wickedness was dis- 
couraged in high places. The lively pamphlet in which 



il] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 19 

Defoe lent his assistance to the good work entitled The 
Poor Man's Plea, was written in the spirit of the parlia- 
mentary address. It was of no use to pass laws and make 
declarations and proclamations for the reform of the com- 
mon plebeii, the poor man pleaded, so long as the mentors 
of the laws were themselves corrupt. His argument was 
spiced with amusing anecdotes to show the prevalence of 
swearing and drunkenness among members of the judicial 
bench. Defoe appeared several times afterwards in the 
character of a reformer of manners, sometimes in verse, 
sometimes in prose. When the retort was made that his 
own manners were not perfect, he denied that this invali- 
dated the worth of his appeal, but at the same time chal- 
lenged his accusers to prove him guilty of any of the vices 
that he had satirised. 

It is impossible now to ascertain what induced Defoe 
to break with the Dissenters, among whom he had been 
brought up, but break with them he did in his pamphlet 
against the practice of Occasional Conformity. This prac- 
tice of occasionally taking communion with the Estab- 
lished Church, as a qualification for public office, had 
grown up after the Eevolution, and had attracted very 
little notice till a Dissenting lord mayor, after attending 
church one Sunday forenoon, went in the afternoon with 
all the insignia of his office to a Conventicle. Defoe's ob- 
jection to this is indicated in. his quotation, "If the Lord 
be God, follow Him, but if Baal, then follow him." A 
man, he contended, who could reconcile it with his con- 
science to attend the worship of the Church, had no busi- 
ness to be a Dissenter. Occasional conformity was " either 
a sinful act in itself, or else his dissenting before was sin- 
ful." The Dissenters naturally did not like this intolerant 
logical dilemma, and resented its being forced upon them 



20 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

by one of their own number against a practical compro- 
mise to which the good sense of the majority of them as- 
sented. No reply was made to the pamphlet when first 
issued in 1698 ; and two or three years afterwards Defoe, 
exulting in the unanswerable logic of his position, reprint- 
ed it with a prefatory challenge to Mr. Howe, an eminent 
Dissenting minister. During the next reign, however, when 
a bill was introduced to prohibit the practice of occasional 
conformity, Defoe strenuously wrote against it as a breach 
of the Toleration Act and a measure of persecution. In 
strict logic it is possible to make out a case for his con- 
sistency, but the reasoning must be fine, and he cannot be 
acquitted of having in the first instance practically justi- 
fied a persecution which he afterwards condemned. In 
neither case does he point at the repeal of the Test Act as 
his object, and it is impossible to explain his attitude in 
both cases on the ground of principle. However much 
he objected to see the sacrament taken as a matter of 
form, it was hardly his province, in the circumstances in 
which Dissenters then stood, to lead an outcry against 
the practice; and if he considered it scandalous and sin- 
ful, he could not with much consistency protest against 
the prohibition of it as an act of persecution. Of this no 
person was better aware than Defoe himself, and it is a 
curious circumstance that, in his first pamphlet on the bill 
for putting down occasional conformity, he ridiculed the 
idea of its being persecution to suppress politic or state 
Dissenters, and maintained that the bill did not concern 
true Dissenters at all. To this, however, we must refer 
again in connexion with his celebrated tract, The Short- 
est Way ivith Dissenters. 

The troubles into which the European system was 
plunged by the death of the childless King of Spain, and 



il] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 21 

that most dramatic of historical surprises, the bequest of 
his throne by a death-bed will to the Duke of Anjou, the 
second grandson of Louis XIV., furnished Defoe with a 
great opportunity for his controversial genius. In Charles 
II.'s will, if the legacy was accepted, William saw the ruin 
of a life-long policy. Louis, though he was doubly pledged 
against acknowledging the will, having renounced all pre- 
tensions to the throne of Spain for himself and his heirs 
in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, and consented in two suc- 
cessive treaties of partition to a different plan of succes- 
sion, did not long hesitate ; the news that he had saluted 
his grandson as King of Spain followed close upon the 
news of Charles's death. The balance of the great Catho- 
lic Powers which William had established by years of anx- 
ious diplomacy and costly war, was toppled over by a 
stroke of the pen. With Spain and Italy virtually added 
to his dominions, the French King would now be supreme 
upon the Continent. Louis soon showed that this was his 
view of what had happened, by saying that the Pyrenees 
had ceased to exist. He gave a practical illustration of 
the same view by seizing, with the authority of his grand- 
son, the frontier towns of the Spanish Netherlands, which 
were garrisoned under a special treaty by Dutch troops. 
Though deeply enraged at the bad faith of the most 
Christian King, William was not dismayed. The stone 
which he had rolled up the hill with such effort had sud- 
denly rolled down again, but he was eager to renew his 
labours. Before, however, he could act, he found himself, 
to his utter astonishment and mortification, paralysed by 
the attitude of the English Parliament. His alarm at the 
accession of a Bourbon to the Spanish throne was not 
shared by the ruling classes in England. They declared 
that they liked the Spanish King's will better than Wil- 



22 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

liam's partition. France, they argued, would gain much 
less by a dynastic alliance with Spain, which would ex- 
ist no longer than their common interests dictated, than 
by the complete acquisition of the Spanish provinces in 
Italy. 

William lost no time in summoning a new Parliament. 
An overwhelming majority opposed the idea of vindicat- 
ing the Partition Treaty by arms. They pressed him to 
send a message of recognition to Philip V. Even the oc- 
cupation of the Flemish fortresses did not change their 
temper. That, they said, was the affair of the Dutch ; it 
did not concern England. In vain William tried to con- 
vince them that the interests of the two Protestant States 
were identical. In the numerous pamphlets that were 
hatched by the ferment, it was broadly insinuated that the 
English people might pay too much for the privilege of 
having a Dutch King, who had done nothing for them 
that they could not have done for themselves, and who 
was perpetually sacrificing the interests of his adopted 
country to the necessities of his beloved Holland. What 
had England gained by the Peace of liyswick ? Was 
England to be dragged into another exhausting war, mere- 
ly to secure a strong frontier for the Dutch ? The appeal 
found ready listeners among a people in whose minds the 
recollections of the last war were still fresh, and who still 
felt the burdens it had left behind. William did not 
venture to take any steps to form an alliance against 
France, till a new incident emerged to shake the country 
from its mood of surly calculation. When James II. died 
and Louis recognised the Pretender as King of England, 
all thoughts of isolation from a Continental confederacy 
were thrown to the winds. William dissolved his Long 
Parliament, and found the new House as warlike as the 



ii.] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 23 

former had been peaceful. " Of all the nations in the 
world," cried Defoe, in commenting on this sudden change 
of mood, " there is none that I know of so entirely gov- 
erned by their humour as the English." 

For ten months Defoe had been vehemently but vainly 
striving to accomplish by argument what had been wrought 
in an instant by the French King's insufferable insult. It 
is one of the most brilliant periods of his political activity. 
Comparatively undistinguished before, he now, at the age 
of forty, stepped into the foremost rank of publicists. He 
lost not a moment in throwing himself into the fray as the 
champion of the king's policy. Charles of Spain died on 
the 22nd of October, 1701 ; by the middle of November, 
a few days after the news had reached England, and before 
the French King's resolve to acknowledge the legacy was 
known, Defoe was ready with a pamphlet to the clear and 
stirring title of — The Tivo Great questions considered. I. 
What the French King will do tvith respect to the Spanish 
Monarchy. II. What measures the English ought to take. 
If the French King were wise, he argued, he would reject 
the dangerous gift for his grandson. But if he accepted 
it, England had no choice but to combine with her late 
allies the Emperor and the States, and compel the Duke of 
Anjou to withdraw his claims. This pamphlet being vir- 
ulently attacked, and its author accused of bidding for a 
place at Court, Defoe made a spirited rejoinder, and seized 
the occasion to place his arguments in still clearer light. 
Between them the two pamphlets are a masterly exposition, 
from the point of view of English interests, of the danger 
of permitting the Will to be fulfilled. He tears the argu- 
ments of his opponents to pieces with supreme scorn. 
What matters it to us who is King of Spain? asks one 
adversary. As well ask, retorts Defoe, what it matters to 



24 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

us who is King of Ireland. All this talk about the Bal- 
ance of Power, says another^ is only " a shoeing-horn to 
draw on a standing army." We do not want an army ; 
only let us make our fleet strong enough and we may defy 
the *world ; our militia is perfectly able to defend us 
against invasion. If our militia is so strong, is Defoe's 
reply, why should a standing-army make us fear for our 
domestic liberties ? But if you object to a standing-army 
in England, avert the danger by subsidising allies and rais- 
ing and paying troops in Germany and the Low Countries. 
Even if we are capable of beating off invasion, it is always 
wise policy to keep the war out of our own country, and 
not trust to such miracles as the dispersion of the Armada. 
In war, Defoe says, repeating a favourite axiom of his, " it 
is not the longest sword but the longest purse that con- 
quers," and if the French get the Spanish crown, they get 
the richest trade in the world into their hands. The 
French would prove better husbands of the wealth of Mex- 
ico and Peru than the Spaniards. They would build fleets 
with it, which would place our American plantations at 
their mercy. Our own trade with Spain, one of the most 
profitable fields of our enterprise, would at once be ruined. 
Our Mediterranean trade would be burdened with the im- 
post of a toll at Gibraltar. In short Defoe contended, if 
the French acquired the upper hand in Spain, nothing but 
a miracle could save England from becoming practically a 
French province. 

Defoe's appeal to the sense of self-interest fell, however, 
upon deaf ears. No eloquence or ingenuity of argument 
could have availed to stem the strong current of growling 
prepossession. He was equally unsuccessful in his attempt 
to touch deeper feelings by exhibiting in . a pamphlet, 
which is perhaps the ablest of the series, The danger of the 



ii.J KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 25 

Protestant Religion, from the present prospect of a Relig- 
ious War in Europe, "Surely you cannot object to a 
standing army for the defence of your religion?" he ar- 
gued ; " for if you do, then you stand convicted of valuing 
your liberties more than your religion, which ought to be 
your first and highest concern." Such scraps of rhetorical 
logic were but as straws in the storm of anti-warlike pas- 
sion that was then ragino;. Nor did Defoe succeed in 
turning the elections by addressing " to the good people 
of England " his Six Distinguishing Characters of a Par- 
liament Man, or by protesting as a freeholder against the 
levity of making the strife between the new and the old 
East India Companies a testing question, when the very 
existence of the kingdom was at stake. His pamphlets 
were widely distributed, but he might as soon have tried 
to check a tempest by throwing handfuls of leaves into it. 
One great success, however, he had, and that, strangely 
enough, in a direction in which it was least to be antici- 
pated. No better proof could be given that the good- 
humoured magnanimity and sense of fair-play on which 
English people pride themselves is more than an empty 
boast than the reception accorded to Defoe's True-Bom 
Englishman. King William's unpopularity was at its 
height. A party writer of the time had sought to inflame 
the general dislike to his Dutch favourites by " a vile pam- 
phlet in abhorred verse," entitled The Foreigners, in w T hich 
they are loaded with scurrilous insinuations. It required 
no ordinary courage in the state of the national temper at 
that moment to venture upon the line of retort that Defoe 
adopted. "What were the English, he demanded, that they 
should make a mock of foreigners ? They were the most 
mongrel race that ever lived upon the face of the earth ; 
there was no such thing as a true-born Englishman ; they 

2* 



26 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

were all the offspring of foreigners ; what was more, of the 
scum of foreigners. 

" For Englishmen to boast of generation 
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation. 
A true-born Englishman 's a contradiction, 
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction. 

% % %. ifc * 

And here begins the ancient pedigree 

That so exalts our poor nobility. 

'Tis that from some French trooper they derive, 

Who with the Norman bastard did arrive ; 

The trophies of the families appear, 

Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear 

Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear. 

These in the herald's register remain, 

Their noble mean extraction to explain, 

Yet who the hero was no man can tell, 

Whether a drummer or colonel ; 

The silent record blushes to reveal 

Their undescended dark original. 

" These are the heroes that despise the Dutch 
And rail at new-come foreigners so much ; 
Forgetting that themselves are all derived 
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived; 
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones, 
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns ; 
The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot, 
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought ; 
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes, 
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains ; 
Who joined with Norman French compound the breed 
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed. 

" And lest, by length of time, it be pretended, 
The climate may this modern breed have mended, 



ii.] KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 27 

Wise Providence, to keep us where we are, 

Mixes us daily with exceeding care ; 

We have been Europe's sink, the jakes where she 

Voids all her offal outcast progeny ; 

From our fifth Henry's time the strolling bands 

Of banished fugitives from neighbouring lands 

Have here a certain sanctuary found : 

The eternal refuge of the vagabond, 

Wherein but half a common age of time, 

Borrowing new blood and manners from the clime, 

Proudly they learn all mankind to contemn, 

And all their race are true-born Englishmen." 

As may be judged from this specimen, there is little deli- 
cacy in Defoe's satire. The lines run on from beginning 
to end in the same strain of bold, broad, hearty banter, as 
if the whole piece had been written off at a heat. The 
mob did not lynch the audacious humourist. In the very 
height of their fury against foreigners, they stopped short 
to laugh at themselves. They were tickled by the hard 
blows as we may suppose a rhinoceros to be tickled by the 
strokes of an oaken cudgel. Defoe suddenly woke to find 
himself the hero of the hour, at least with the London 
populace. The pamphlet was pirated, and eighty thousand 
copies, according to his own calculation, were sold in the 
streets. Henceforth he described himself in his title-pages 
as the author of the True-Barn Englishman, and frequent- 
ly did himself the honour of quoting from the work as 
from a well-established classic. It was also, he has told 
us, the means of his becoming personally known to the 
King, whom he had hitherto served from a distance. 

Defoe was not the man to be abashed by his own pop- 
ularity. He gloried in it, and added to his reputation by 
taking a prominent part in the proceedings connected with 



28 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

the famous Kentish Petition, which marked the turn of 
the tide in favour of the King's foreign policy. Defoe 
was said to be the author of " Legion's Memorial " to the 
House of Commons, sternly warning the representatives of 
the freeholders that they had exceeded their powers in im- 
prisoning the men who had prayed them to " turn their 
loyal addresses into Bills of Supply." When the Kentish 
Petitioners were liberated from the custody of the Ser- 
geant-at-Arms, and feasted by the citizens at Mercers' Hall, 
Defoe was seated next to them as an honoured guest. 

Unfortunately for Defoe, William did not live long 
after he had been honoured with his Majesty's confidence. 
He declared afterwards that he had often been privately 
consulted by the King. The pamphlets which he wrote 
during the close of the reign are all such as might have 
been directly inspired. That on the Succession is chiefly 
memorable as containing a suggestion that the heirs of the 
Duke of Monmouth should be heard as to King Charles's 
alleged marriage with Lucy Walters. It is possible that 
this idea may have been sanctioned by the King, who had 
had painful experience of the disadvantages attending a 
ruler of foreign extraction, and besides had reason to doubt 
the attachment of the Princess Sophia to the Protestant 
faith. When the passionate aversion to war in the popu- 
lar mind was suddenly changed by the recognition of the 
Pretender into an equally passionate thirst for it, and the 
King seized the opportunity to dissolve Parliament and 
get a new House in accord with the altered temper of the 
people, Defoe justified the appeal to the freeholders by an 
examination and assertion of " the Original Power of the 
Collective Body of the People of England." His last ser- 
vice to the King was a pamphlet bearing the paradoxical 
title, Reasons against a War with France, As Defoe had 



il] KIXG WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT. 29 

for nearly a year been zealously working the public mind 
to a warlike pitch, this title is at first surprising, but the 
surprise disappears when we find that the pamphlet is an 
ingenious plea for beginning with a declaration of war 
against Spain, showing that not only was there just cause 
for such a war, but that it would be extremely profitable, 
inasmuch as it would afford occasion for plundering the 
Spaniards in the "West Indies, and thereby making up for 
whatever losses our trade might suffer from the French 
privateers. And it was more than a mere plundering de- 
scent that Defoe had in view ; his object was that England 
should take actual possession of the Spanish Indies, and 
so rob Spain of its chief source of wealth. There was 
a most powerful buccaneering spirit concealed under the 
peaceful title of this pamphlet. The trick of arresting at- 
tention by an unexpected thesis, such as this promise of 
reasons for peace when everybody was dreaming of war, is 
an art in which Defoe has never been surpassed. As we 
shall have occasion to see, he practised it more than once 
too often for his comfort. 



CHAPTER III. 

A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 

From the death of the King in March, 1702, we must 
date a change in Defoe's relations with the ruling powers. 
Under William, his position as a political writer had been 
distinct and honourable. He supported William's policy 
warmly and straightforwardly, whether he. divined it by his 
own judgment, or learned it by direct or indirect instruc- 
tions or hints. When charged with writing for a place, 
he indignantly denied that he held either place or pension 
at Court, but at another time he admitted that he had been 
employed by the King and rewarded by him beyond his 
deserts. Any reward that he received for his literary ser- 
vices was well earned, and there was nothing dishonourable 
in accepting it. For concealing the connexion while the 
King was alive, he might plead the custom of the time. 
But in the confusion of parties and the uncertainty of gov- 
ernment that followed William's death, Defoe slid into 
practices which cannot be justified by any standard of 
morality. 

It was by accident that Defoe drifted into this equivo- 
cal position. His first writings under the new reign were 
in staunch consistency w T ith what he had written before. 
He did not try to flatter the Queen as many others did by 



chap, in.] A MARTYR TO DISSEXT ? 31 

slighting her predecessors ; on the contrary, he wrote a 
poem called The Mock Mourners, in which he extolled 
" the glorious memory " — a phrase which he did much to 
bring into use — and charged those who spoke disrespect- 
fully of William with the vilest insolence and ingratitude. 
He sang the praises of the Queen also, but as he based his 
joy at her accession on an assurance that she would follow 
in William's footsteps, the compliment might be construed 
as an exhortation. Shortly afterwards, in another poem, 
The Spanish Descent, he took his revenge upon the fleet 
for not carrying out his West Indian scheme by ridiculing 
unmercifully their first fruitless cruise on the Spanish 
coast, taking care at the same time to exult in the cap- 
ture of the galleons at Vigo. In yet another poem — 
the success of the True Born Englishman seems to have 
misguided him into the belief that he had a genius for 
verse — he reverted to the Reformation of Manners, and 
angered the Dissenters by belabouring certain magistrates 
of their denomination. A pamphlet entitled A New Test 
of the Church of England's Loyalty — in which he twitted 
the High-Church party with being neither more nor less 
loyal than the Dissenters, inasmuch as they consented to 
the deposition of James and acquiesced in the accession of 
Anne — was better received by his co-religionists. 

But wdien the Bill to prevent occasional conformity 
was introduced by some hot-headed partisans of the High 
Church, towards the close of 1702, with the Queen's warm 
approval, Defoe took a course which made the Dissenters 
threaten to cast him altogether out of the synagogue. 
We have already seen how Defoe had taken the lead in 
attacking the practice of occasional conformity. While 
his co-religionists w T ere imprecating him as the man who 
had brought this persecution upon them, Defoe added to 



32 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

their ill-feeling by issuing a jaunty pamphlet in which he 
proved with provoking unanswerableness that all honest 
Dissenters were noways concerned in the Bill. Nobody, 
he said, with his usual bright audacity, but himself "who 
w 7 as altogether born in sin," saw the true scope of the 
measure. "All those people who designed the Act as 
a blow to the Dissenting interests in England are mis- 
taken. All those who take it as a prelude or introduction 
to the further suppressing of the Dissenters, and a step 
to repealing the Toleration, or intend it as such, are mis- 
taken All those phlegmatic Dissenters who fancy 

themselves undone, and that persecution and desolation 
is at the door again, are mistaken. All those Dissenters 
who are really at all disturbed at it, either as an advantage 
gained by their enemies or as a real disaster upon them- 
selves, are mistaken. All those Dissenters who deprecate 
it as a judgment, or would vote against it as such if it 
were in their power, are mistaken." In short, though he 
did not suppose that the movers of the Bill " did it in 
mere kindness to the Dissenters, in order to refine and 
purge them from the scandals which some people had 
brought upon them," nevertheless it was calculated to 
effect this object. The Dissenter being a man that was 
u something desirous of going to Heaven," ventured the 
displeasure of the civil magistrate at the command of his 
conscience, which warned him that there were things in 
the Established form of worship not agreeable to the Will 
of God as revealed in Scripture. There is nothing in 
the Act to the prejudice of this Dissenter ; it affects only 
the Politic Dissenter, or State Dissenter, who if he can 
attend the Established worship without offending his con- 
science, has no cause to be a Dissenter. An act against 
occasional conformity would rid the Dissenting body of 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 33 

these lukewarm members, and the riddance would be a. 
good thing for all parties. 

It may have been that this cheerful argument, the legit- 
imate development of Defoe's former writings on the sub- 
ject, was intended to comfort his co-religionists at a mo- 
ment when the passing of the Act seemed certain. They 
did not view it in that light ; they resented it bitterly, as 
an insult in the hour of their misfortune from the man 
who had shown their enemies where to strike. When, 
however, the Bill, after passing the Commons, was op- 
posed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly ap- 
peared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his 
political pamphlets, The Shortest Way tvith the Dissent- 
ers, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained 
him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs 
of Dissent. In the " brief explanation " of the pamphlet 
which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bear- 
ing whatever upon the Occasional Conformity Bill, point- 
ing to his former writings on the subject, in which he had 
denounced the practice, and welcomed the Bill as a use- 
ful instrument for purging the Dissenting bodies of half- 
and-half professors. It was intended, he said, as a banter 
upon the High-flying Tory Churchmen, putting into plain 
English the drift of their furious invectives against the 
Dissenters, and so, " by an irony not unusual," answering 
them out of their own mouths. 

The Shortest Way is sometimes spoken of as a piece of 
exquisite irony, and on the other hand Mr. Saintsbury 1 has 
raised the question whether the representation of an ex- 
treme case, in which the veil is never lifted from the writ- 
er's own opinions, can properly be called irony at all. 

1 In an admirable article on Defoe in the Encyclopcedia Britan- 
nica. 



34 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

This last is, perhaps, a question belonging to the strict 
definition of the figures of speech ; but, however that 
might be settled, it is a mistake to describe Defoe's art in 
this pamphlet as delicate. There are no subtle strokes of 
wit in it such as we find in some of Swift's ironical pieces. 
Incomparably more effective as an engine of controversy, 
it is not entitled to the same rank as a literary exercise. 
Its whole merit and its rousing political force lay in the 
dramatic genius with which Defoe personated the temper 
of a thorough-going High-flier, putting into plain and spir- 
ited English such sentiments as a violent partisan would 
not dare to utter except in the unguarded heat of familiar 
discourse, or the half - humorous ferocity of intoxication. 
Have done, he said, addressing the Dissenters, with this 
cackle about Peace and Union, and the Christian duties of 
moderation, which you raise now that you find " your day 
is over, your power gone, and the throne of this nation 
possessed by a Royal, English, true, and ever - constant 
member of and friend to the Church of England. . . . We 
have heard none of this lesson for fourteen years past. 
We have been huffed and bullied with your Act of Toler- 
ation ; you have told us that you are the Church estab- 
lished by law as well as others ; have set up your canting 
synagogues at our Church doors, and the Church and mem- 
bers have been loaded with reproaches, with oaths, associa- 
tions, abjurations, and what not. Where has been the 
mercy, the forbearance, the charity, you have shown to 
tender consciences of the Church of England, that could 
not take oaths as fast as you made them ; that having 
sworn allegiance to their lawful and rightful King, could 
not dispense with that oath, their King being still alive, 
and swear to your new hodge-podge of a Dutch constitu- 
tion ? . . . Now that the tables are turned upon you, you 



iil] A MARTYR TO DISSENT ? 35 

must not be persecuted ; 'tis not a Christian spirit." You 
talk of persecution ; what persecution have you to com- 
plain of ? " The first execution of the laws against Dis- 
senters in England was in the days of King James I. And 
what did it amount to ? Truly the worst they suffered 
was at their own request to let them go to New England 
and erect a new T colony, and give them great privileges, 
grants, and suitable powers, keep them under protection, 
and defend them against all invaders, and receive no taxes 
or revenue from them. This was the cruelty of the 
Church of England — fatal lenity ! 'Twas the ruin of that 
excellent prince, King Charles I. Had King James sent 
all the Puritans in England away to the West Indies, we 
had been a national, unmixed Church ; the Church of 
England had been kept undivided and entire. To requite 
the lenity of the father, they take up arms against the 
son ; conquer, pursue, take, imprison, and at last put to 
death the Anointed of God, and destroy the very being 
and nature of government, setting up a sordid impostor, 
who had neither title to govern, nor understanding to man- 
age, but supplied that want with power, bloody and des- 
perate councils, and craft, without conscience." How len- 
iently had King Charles treated these barbarous regicides, 
coming in all mercy and love, cherishing them, preferring 
them, giving them employment in his service. As for 
King James, "as if mercy was the inherent quality of the 
family, he began his reign with unusual favour to them, nor 
could their joining with the Duke of Monmouth against 
him move him to do himself justice upon them, but that 
mistaken prince thought to win them by gentleness and 
love, proclaimed a universal liberty to them, and rather dis- 
countenanced the Church of England than them. How 
they requited him all the world knows." Under King 



36 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

William, " a king of their own/' they " crope into all 
places of trust and profit," engrossed the ministry, and in- 
sulted the Church. Bat they must not expect this kind 
of thing to continue. " No, gentlemen, the time of mercy 
is past ; your day of grace is over ; you should have prac- 
tised peace, and moderation, and charity, if you expected 
any yourselves." 

In this heroic strain the pamphlet proceeds, reaching at 
length the suggestion that " if one severe law were made, 
and punctually executed, that whoever was found at a con- 
venticle should be banished the nation, and the preacher 
be hanged, we should soon see an end of the tale — they 
would all come to church, and one age would make us 
all one again." That was the mock churchman's shortest 
way for the suppression of Dissent. He supported his 
argument by referring to the success with which Louis 
XIV. had put down the Huguenots. There was no good 
in half -measures, fines of five shillings a month for not 
coming to the Sacrament, and one shilling a week for not 
coming to church. It was vain to expect compliance from 
such trifling. " The light, foolish handling of them by 
mulcts, fines, etc., 'tis their glory and their advantage. If 
the gallows instead of the counter, and the galleys instead 
of the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle, to 
preach or hear, there would not be so many sufferers — 
the spirit of martyrdom is over. They that will go to 
church to be chosen sheriffs and mayors, would go to forty 
churches rather than be hanged." " Now let us crucify 
the thieves," said the author of this truculent advice in 
conclusion. "And may God Almighty put it into the 
hearts of all friends of truth to lift up a standard against 
pride and Antichrist, that the posterity of the sons of er- 
ror may be rooted out from the face of this land for ever." 



in.] A MAKTYR TO DISSENT ? 37 

Defoe's disguise was so complete, his caricature of the 
ferocious High-flier so near to life, that at first people 
doubted whether the Shortest Way was the work of a 
satirist or a fanatic. When the truth leaked out, as it 
soon did, the Dissenters were hardly better pleased than 
while they feared that the proposal was serious. With 
the natural timidity of precariously situated minorities, 
they could not enter into the humour of it. The very 
title was enough to make them shrink and tremble. The 
only people who were really in a position to, enjoy the 
jest were the Whigs. The High - Churchmen, some of 
whom, it is said, were at first so far taken in as to ex- 
press their warm approval, were furious when they dis- 
covered the trick that had been played upon them. The 
Tory ministers of the Queen felt themselves bound to 
take proceedings against the author, whose identity seems 
to have soon become an open secret. Learning this, De- 
foe went into concealment. A proclamation offering a 
reward for his discovery was advertised in the Gazette. 
The description of the fugitive is interesting ; it is the 
only extant record of Defoe's personal appearance, except 
the portrait prefixed to his collected works, in which the 
mole is faithfully reproduced : — 

" He is a middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, 
of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but 
wears a wig ; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a 
large mole near his mouth : was born in London, and for 
many years was a hose-factor in Freeman's Yard in Cornhill, 
and now is the owner of the brick and pantile works near 
Tilbury Fort in Essex." 

This advertisement was issued on the 10th of January, 
1703. Meantime the printer and the publisher were 



38 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

seized. From his safe hiding, Defoe put forth an ex- 
planation, protesting, as we have seen, that his pamphlet 
had not the least retrospect to or concern in the public 
bills in Parliament now depending, or any other proceed- 
ing of either House or of the Government relating to the 
Dissenters, whose occasional conformity the author has 
constantly opposed. It was merely, he pleaded, the cant 
of the Non-juring party exposed ; and he mentioned sev- 
eral printed books in which the same objects were ex- 
pressed, though not in words so plain, and at length. But 
the Government would not take this view ; he had repre- 
sented virulent partisans as being supreme in the Queen's 
counsels, and his design was manifest "to blacken the 
Church party as men of a persecuting spirit, and to pre- 
pare the mob for what further service he had for them to 
do." Finding that they would not listen to him, Defoe 
surrendered himself, in order that others might not surfer 
for his offence. He was indicted on the 24th of Febru- 
ary. On the 25th, the Shortest Way was brought under 
the notice of the House of Commons, and ordered to be 
burnt by the common hangman. His trial came on in 
July. He was found guilty of a seditious libel, and sen- 
tenced to pay a fine of 200 marks to the Queen, stand 
three times in the pillory, be imprisoned during the 
Queen's pleasure, and find sureties for his good behav- 
iour for seven years. 

Defoe complained that three Dissenting ministers, whose 
poor he had fed in the days of his prosperity, had refused 
to visit him during his confinement in Newgate. There 
was, doubtless, a want of charity in their action, but there 
was also a want of honesty in his complaint. If he ap- 
plied for their spiritual ministrations, they had considera- 
ble reason for treating his application as a piece of pro- 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 39 

yoking effrontery. Though. Defoe was in prison for this 
banter upon the High-fliers, it is a mistake to regard him 
as a martyr, except by accident, to the cause of Toleration 
as we understand it now, and as the Dissenters bore the 
brunt of the battle for it then. Before his trial and con- 
viction, while he lay in prison, he issued an exposition of 
his views of a fair Toleration in a tract entitled The Short- 
est Way to Peace and Union. The toleration which he ad- 
vised, and which commended itself to the moderate Whigs 
with whom he had acted under King William and was 
probably acting now, was a purely spiritual Toleration. 
His proposal, in fact, was identical with that of Charles 
Leslie's in the New Association, one of the pamphlets 
which he professed to take off in his famous squib. Les- 
lie had proposed that the Dissenters should be excluded 
from all civil employments, and should be forced to re- 
main content with liberty of worship. Addressing the 
Dissenters, Defoe, in effect, urged them to anticipate for- 
cible exclusion by voluntary withdrawal. Extremes on 
both sides should be industriously crushed and discour- 
aged, and the extremes on the Dissenting side were those 
who, not being content to worship after their own fash- 
ion, had also a hankering after the public service. It is 
the true interest of the Dissenters in England, Defoe ar- 
gued, to be governed by a Church of England magistracy ; 
and with his usual paradoxical hardihood, he told his co- 
religionists bluntly that "the first reason of his proposi- 
tion was that they were not qualified to be trusted with 
the government of themselves." When we consider the 
active part Defoe himself took in public affairs, we shall 
not be surprised that offence was given by his countenan- 
cing the civil disabilities of Dissenters, and that the Dissent- 
ing preachers declined to recognise him as properly belong- 



40 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

ing to their body. It was not, indeed, as a Dissenter that 
Defoe was prosecuted by the violent Tories then in power, 
but as the suspected literary instrument of the great Whig 
leaders. 

This, of course, in no way diminishes the harsh and 
spiteful impolicy of the sentence passed on Defoe. Its 
terms were duly put in execution. The offending satirist 
stood in the pillory on the three last days of July, 1703, 
before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, near the Conduit 
in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. It is incorrect, however, 
to say with Pope that 

" Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe." 

His ears were not cropped, as the barbarous phrase went, 
and he had no reason to be abashed. His reception by 
the mob was very different from that accorded to the anti- 
Jacobite Fuller, a scurrilous rogue who had tried to make a 
few pounds by a Plain Proof that the Chevalier was a sup- 
posititious child. The author of the True-Born English- 
man was a popular favourite, and his exhibition in the 
pillory was an occasion of triumph and not of ignominy 
to him. A ring of admirers was formed round the place 
of punishment, and bunches of flowers instead of hand- 
fuls of garbage were thrown at the criminal. Tankards 
of ale and stoups of wine were drunk in his honour by 
the multitude whom he had delighted with his racy 
verse and charmed by his bold defiance of the authori- 
ties. 

The enthusiasm was increased by the timely publication 
of a Hymn to the Pillory, in which Defoe boldly declared 
the iniquity of his sentence, and pointed out to the Gov- 
ernment more proper objects of their severity. Atheists 
ought to stand there, he said, profligate beaux, swindling 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT ? 41 

stock-jobbers, fanatic Jacobites, and the commanders who 
had brought the English fleet into disgrace. As for him, 
his only fault lay in his not being understood ; but he was 
perhaps justly punished for being such a fool as to trust 
his meaning to irony. It would seem that though the 
Government had committed Defoe to Newgate, they did 
not dare, even before the manifestation of popular feeling 
in his favour, to treat him as a common prisoner. He 
not only had liberty to write, but he found means to con- 
vey his manuscripts to the printer. Of these privileges he 
had availed himself with that indomitable energy and fer- 
tility of resource which we find reason to admire at every 
stage in his career, and most of all now that he was in 
straits. In the short interval between his arrest and his 
conviction he carried on a vigorous warfare with both 
hands, — with one hand seeking to propitiate the Govern- 
ment, with the other attracting support outside among the 
people. He proved to the Government incontestably, by a 
collection of his writings, that he was a man of moderate 
views, who had no aversion in principle even to the pro- 
posals of the New Association. He proved the same thing 
to the people at large by publishing this Collection of the 
ivritings of the author of the Trite-Born Englishman, but 
he accompanied the proof by a lively appeal to their sym- 
pathy under the title of More Reformation, a Satire on 
himself a lament over his own folly which was calculated 
to bring pressure on the Government against prosecuting 
a man so innocent of public wrong. When, in spite of 
his efforts, a conviction was recorded against him, he 
adopted a more defiant tone towards the Government. 
He wrote the Hymn to the Pillory. This daring effusion 
was hawked in the streets among the crowd that had assem- 
bled to witness his penance in the 

3 



42 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

" hieroglyphic State-machine, 
Contrived to punish Fancy in." 

" Come," he cried, in the concluding lines — 

" Tell 'em the M that placed him here 

Are Sc Is to the times, 

Are at a loss to find his guilt, 
And can't commit his crimes." 

" M " stands for Men, and " Sc Is " for Scandals. 

Defoe delighted in this odd use of methods of reserve, 
more common in his time than in ours. 

The dauntless courage of Defoe's Hymn to the Pillory 
can only be properly appreciated when we remember with 
what savage outrage it was the custom of the mob to treat 
those who were thus exposed to make a London holiday. 
From the pillory he was taken back to Newgate, there to 
be imprisoned during her Majesty's pleasure. His con- 
finement must have been much less disagreeable to him 
than it would have been to one of less hardy temperament. 
Defoe was not the man to shrink with loathing from the 
companionship of thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners, 
and pirates. Curiosity w r as a much stronger power with 
him than disgust. Newgate had something of the charm 
for Defoe that a hospital full of hideous diseases has for 
an enthusiastic surgeon. He spent many pleasant hours 
in listening to the tales of his adventurous fellow-prisoners. 
Besides, the Government did not dare to deprive him of 
the liberty of writing and publishing. This privilege en- 
abled him to appeal to the public, whose ear he had gained 
in the character of an undismayed martyr, an enjoyment 
which to so buoyant a man must have compensated for a 
great deal of irksome suffering. He attributed the failure 



nx] A MARTYR TO DISSENT ? 43 

:: L: .:: I: .wrr : :■ :.:s re::: : ":.l ::::.: :_:: 

cement of them ; but bearing in mind the amount of 

sss that had attended his efforts when he was free, it 

is fair to snpj )se that he was not altogether sorry foi the 

It was by no means the intention of his High- 

Ghnrch persecutors :r.at Defoe should enjoy himself in 

Newg he himself lamented loudly the strange re- 

rerse bj — hich he i passed within :. few m:r.ti:s :: : ::: 

loset >f a king to a prisoner's cell ; but on the whole 
he was probably as happy in Newgate as he had t 
-Whitehall. His wife and six children were most tc be 
.:-::■ distirss was his heaviest trial. 
Th a first as : which Defc :- mad 3 of his [ ::_ aftei his ex- 
hibition in the pill as tc reply to a Dissenting minis- 

ter who had justdfi ; i th : \ 1 ::: :■ 3 c : occasional conformity. 
He th erked once more his sej .ration from th : ::.- 

treme Dissenters, who were straggling against having their 
religion made a disqualification for offices : nblic trust 
Bnt in th 5 of parties at Court he soon found a 

1 for marking his separation from the opposite 
treme, and facing the other way. Ue a the influence of 
the moderate Tories, Marlborough, Godolphin, and their 
invaluable ally, the Duchess, the Queen was gradually los- 
ing faith in the violent Tories. According tc Swift, she 
3gan to dislike her bos;::: friend, Mrs. Freeman, from the 
moment of her accession, bnt though she may have chafed 
ke of her favourite, she could not at once 
shake off the domination of that imperious will The 
Duchess, finding the extreme Tories unfavourable to the 
war in which her husband's honour and interests wer€ 
deeply engaged, became a hot part:-:: against them, and 
all th :: t inn lei s tc bi ; -:.".-: down their power at Court. 
J upon the Queen the necessity 



44 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

of peace and union at home in the face of the troubles 
abroad. The moderate men of both parties must be ral- 
lied round the throne. Extremes on both sides must be 
discouraged. Spies were set to work to take note of such 
rash expressions among "the hot and angry men" as would 
be likely to damage them in the Queen's favour. Queen 
Anne had not a little of the quiet tenacity and spitefulness 
of enfeebled constitutions, but in the end reason prevailed, 
resentment at importunity was overcome, and the hold of 
the High-Churchmen on her affections gave way. 

Nobody, Swift has told us, could better disguise her 
feelings than the Queen. The first intimation which the 
High-Church party had of her change of views was her 
opening speech to Parliament on the 9th November, 1703, 
in which she earnestly desired parties in both Houses to 
avoid heats and divisions. Defoe at once threw himself 
in front of the rising tide. Whether he divined for him- 
self that the influence of the Earl of Nottingham, the Sec- 
retary of State, to whom he owed his prosecution and im- 
prisonment, was waning, or obtained a hint to that effect 
from his "Whig friends, we do not know, but he lost no 
time in issuing from his prison a bold attack upon the 
High -Churchmen. In his Challenge of Peace, addressed 
to the whole Nation, he denounced them as Church Vul- 
tures and Ecclesiastical Harpies. It was they and not the 
Dissenters that were the prime movers of strife and dis- 
sension. How are peace and union to be obtained, he 
asks. He will show people first how peace and union can- 
not be obtained. 

a First, Sachevereirs Bloody Flag of Defiance is not the. 
way to Peace and Union. The shortest way to destroy is not 
the shortest way to unite. Persecution, Laws to Compel, Re- 
strain or force the Conscience of one another, is not the wav 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 45 

to this Union, which her Majesty has so earnestly recom- 
mended. 

" Secondly, to repeal or contract the late Act of Toleration 
is not the way for this so much wished -for happiness; to 
have laws revived that should set one party a plundering, 
excommunicating and unchurching another, that should re- 
new the oppressions and devastations of late reigns, this will 
not by any means contribute to this Peace, which all good 
men desire. 

" New Associations and proposals to divest men of their 
freehold right for differences in opinion, and take away the 
right of Dissenters voting in elections of Members ; this is 
not the way to Peace and Union. 

" Railing pamphlets, buffooning our brethren as a party to 
be suppressed, and dressing them up in the Bear's skin for 
all the dogs in the street to bait them, is not the way to 
Peace and Union. 

" Railing sermons, exciting people to hatred and contempt 
of their brethren, because they differ in opinions, is not the 
way to Peace and Union. 

" Shutting all people out of employment and the service 
of their Prince and Country, unless they can comply with in- 
different ceremonies of religion, is far from the way to Peace 
and Union. 

" Reproaching the Succession settled by Parliament, and 
reviving the abdicated title of the late King James, and his 
supposed family, cannot tend to this Peace and Union. 

"Laws against Occasional Conformity, and compelling 
people who bear offices to a total conformity, and yet force 
them to take and serve in those public employments, cannot 
contribute to this Peace and Union." 

In this passage Defoe seems to ally himself more close- 
ly with his Dissenting brethren than he had done before. 
It was difficult for him, with his published views on the 
objectionableness of occasional conformity, and the pro- 



46 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

priety of Dissenters leaving the magistracy in the hands 
of the Church, to maintain his new position without incur- 
ring the charge of inconsistency. The charge was freely 
made, and his own writings were collected as a testimony 
against him, but he met the charge boldly. The Dissent- 
ers ought not to practise occasional conformity, but if 
they could reconcile it with their consciences, they ought 
not to receive temporal punishment for practising it. The 
Dissenters ought to withdraw from the magistracy, but it 
was persecution to exclude them. In tract after tract of 
brilliant and trenchant argument, he upheld these views, 
with his usual courage attacking most fiercely those an- 
tagonists who went most nearly on the lines of his own 
previous writings. Ignoring what he had said before, he 
now proved clearly that the Occasional Conformity Bill 
was a breach of the Act of Toleration. There was little 
difference between his own Shortest Way to Peace and 
Union and Sir Humphrey Mack worth's Peace at Home, 
but he assailed the latter pamphlet vigorously, and showed 
that it had been the practice in all countries for Dissent- 
ers from the established religion to have a share in the 
business of the State. At the same time he never depart- 
ed so far from the " moderate " point of view, as to insist 
that Dissenters ought to be admitted to a share in the 
business of the State. Let the High-Church ministers be 
dismissed, and moderate men summoned to the Queen's 
councils, and the Dissenters would have every reason to be 
content. They would acquiesce with pleasure in a minis- 
try and magistracy of Low-Churchmen. 

Defoe's assaults upon the High-Church Tories were nei- 
ther interdicted nor resented by the Government, though 
he lay in prison at their mercy. Throughout the winter 
of 1703-4 the extreme members of the Ministry, though 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT? 47 

they had still a majority in the House of Commons, felt 
the Queen's coldness increase. Their former high place 
in her regard and their continued hold upon Parliament 
tempted them to assume airs of independence which gave 
deeper offence than her unruffled courtesy led either them 
or their rivals to suspect. At last the crisis came. The 
Earl of Nottingham took the rash step of threatening to 
resign unless the Whig Dukes of Somerset and Devon- 
shire were dismissed from the Cabinet. To his surprise 
and chagrin, his resignation was accepted (1704), and two 
more of his* party were dismissed from office at the same 
time. 

The successor of Nottingham was Robert Harley, after- 
wards created Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. He gave evi- 
dence late in life of his love for literature by forming the 
collection of manuscripts known as the Harleian, and we 
know from Swift that he was deeply impressed with the 
importance of having allies in the Press. He entered 
upon office in May, 1704, and one of his first acts was to 
convey to Defoe the message, " Pray, ask that gentleman 
what I can do for him." Defoe replied by likening him- 
self to the blind man in the parable, and paraphrasing his 
prayer, " Lord, that I may receive my sight I" He would 
not seem to have obtained his liberty immediately, but, 
through Harley' s influence, he was set free towards the 
end of July or the beginning of August. The Queen 
also, he afterwards said, " was pleased particularly to in- 
quire into his circumstances and family, and by Lord 
Treasurer Godolphin to send a considerable supply to his 
w r ife and family, and to send him to the prison money to 
pay his fine and the expenses of his discharge." 

On what condition was Defoe released ? On condition, 
according to the Elegy on the Author of the True-Born 



48 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

Englishman, which he published immediately after his 
discharge, that he should keep silence for seven years, or 
at least " not write what some people might not like." 
To the public he represented himself as a martyr grudg- 
ingly released by the Government, and restrained from at- 
tacking them only by his own bond and the fear of legal 
penalties. 

" Memento Mori here I stand, 
With silent lips but speaking hand ; 

A walking shadow of a Poet, 
But bound to hold my tongue and never "show it. 
A monument of injury, 
A sacrifice to legal t(yrann)y." 

" For shame, gentlemen," he humorously cries to his ene- 
mies, " do not strike a dead man ; beware, scribblers, of 
fathering your pasquinades against authority upon me; 
for seven years the True-Born Englishman is tied under 
sureties and penalties not to write. 

" To seven long years of silence I betake, 
Perhaps by then I may forget to speak." 

This elegy he has been permitted to publish as his last 
speech and dying confession — 

" When malefactors come to die 
They claim uncommon liberty : 
Freedom of speech gives no distaste, 
They let them talk at large, because they talk their last." 

The public could hardly have supposed from this what 
Defoe afterwards admitted to have been the true state of 
the case, namely, that on leaving prison he was taken into 
the service of the Government. He obtained an appoint- 



in.] A MARTYR TO DISSENT ? 49 

merit, that is to say a pension, from the Queen, and was 
employed on secret services. When charged afterwards 
with having written by Harley's instructions, he denied 
this, but admitted the existence of certain " capitulations," 
in which he stipulated for liberty to write according to his 
own judgment, guided only by a sense of gratitude to his 
benefactor. There is reason to believe that even this is 
not the whole truth. Documents which Mr. Lee recently 
brought to light make one suspect that Defoe was all the 
time in private relations with the leaders of the Whig 
party. Of this more falls to be said in another place. 
The True-Born Englishman was, indeed, dead. Defoe was 
no longer the straightforward advocate of Kino* William's 
policy. He was engaged henceforward in serving two 
masters, persuading each that he served him alone, and 
persuading the public, in spite of numberless insinuations, 
that he served nobody but them and himself, and wrote 
simply as a free lance under the jealous sufferance of the 
Government of the day. 

I must reserve for a separate chapter some account of 
Defoe's greatest political work, which he began while he 
still lay in Newgate, the Review. Another work which he 
wrote and published at the same period deserves attention 
on different grounds. His history of the great storm of 
Xovember, 1703,^4 Collection of the most remarkable Cas- 
ualties and Disasters ivhich happened in the late Dreadfal 
Tempest, both by Sea and Land, may be set down as the 
first of his works of invention. It is a most minute and 
circumstantial record, containing many letters from eye- 
witnesses of what happened in their immediate neighbour- 
hood. Defoe could have seen little of the storm himself 
from the interior of Newgate, but it is possible that the 
letters are genuine, and that he compiled other details 



50 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. hi. 

from published accounts. Still, we are justified in sus- 
pecting that his annals of the storm are no more authentic 
history than his Journal of the Plague, or his Memoirs of 
a Cavalier, and that for many of the incidents he is equal- 
ly indebted to his imagination. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. 

It was a bold undertaking for a prisoner in Newgate to 
engage to furnish a newspaper written wholly by himself, 
"purged from the errors and partiality of news-writers 
and petty statesmen of all sides." It would, of course, 
have been an impossible undertaking if the Review had 
been, either in size or in contents, like a newspaper of the 
present time. The Review was, in its first stage, a sheet 
of eight small quarto pages. After the first two numbers, 
it w r as reduced in size to four pages, but a smaller type 
was used, so that the amount of matter remained nearly 
the same — about equal in bulk to two modern leading 
articles. At first the issue was weekly ; after four num- 
bers it became bi-weekly, and so remained for a year. 

For the character of the Review it is difficult to find 
a parallel. There was nothing like it at the time, and 
nothing exactly like it has been attempted since. The 
nearest approach to it among its predecessors was the 
Observator, a small weekly journal written by the erratic 
John Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, 
were discussed in dialogues. Personal scandals were a 
prominent feature in the Observator. Defoe was not in- 
sensible to the value of this element to a popular jour- 



52 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

nal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused ; 
and he supplied this want in a section of his paper en- 
titled " Mercure Scan dale ; or, Advice from the Scandal- 
ous Club, being a weekly history of Nonsense, Imperti- 
nence, Vice, and Debauchery." Under this attractive 
heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being 
represented as a tribunal before which offenders were 
brought, their cases heard, and sentence passed upon them. 
Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman frequently figure 
in its proceedings. It was in this section also that Defoe 
exposed the errors of contemporary news-writers, the Post- 
man, the Post- Boy, the London Post, the Flying Post, and 
the Daily Courant. He could not in his prison pretend 
to superior information regarding the events of the day ; 
the errors which he exposed were chiefly blunders in ge- 
ography and history. The Mercure Scan dale was avow- 
edly intended to amuse the frivolous. The lapse of time 
has made its artificial sprightliness dreary. It was in the 
serious portion of the Review, the Review proper, that De- 
foe showed most of his genius. The design of this was 
nothing less than to give a true picture, drawn with " an 
impartial and exact historical pen," of the domestic and 
foreign affairs of all the States of Europe. It was essen- 
tial, he thought, that at such a time of commotion Eng- 
lishmen should be thoroughly informed of the strength 
and the political interests and proclivities of the various 
European Powers. He could not undertake to tell his 
readers what was passing from day to day, but he could 
explain to them the policy of the Continental Courts ; he 
could show how that policy was affected by their past his- 
tory and present interests; he could calculate the forces 
at their disposal, set forth the grounds of their alliances, 
and generally put people in a position to follow the great 



iv.] THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. 53 

game that was being played on the European chess-board. 
In the Review, in fact, as he himself described his task, he 
was writing a history sheet by sheet, and letting the world 
see it as it went on. 

This excellent plan of instruction was carried out with in- 
comparable brilliancy of method, and vivacity of style. De- 
foe was thoroughly master of his subject ; he had read ev- 
ery history that he could lay his hands on, and his connex- 
ion with King William had guided him to the mainsprings 
of political action, and fixed in his mind clear principles for 
England's foreign policy. Such a mass of facts and such 
a maze of interests would have encumbered and perplexed 
a more commonplace intellect, but Defoe handled them 
with experienced and buoyant ease. He had many arts 
for exciting attention. His confinement in Newgate, from 
which the first number of the Review was issued on the 
19th February, 1704, had in no way impaired his clear- 
sighted daring and self-confident skill. There was a spar- 
kle of paradox and a significant lesson in the very title of 
his journal — A Review of the Affairs of France. When, 
by and by, he digressed to the affairs of Sweden and Po- 
land, and filled number after number with the history of 
Hungary, people kept asking, " What has this to do with 
France ?" " How little you understand my design," was 
Defoe's retort. " Patience till my work is completed, and 
then you will see that, however much I may seem to have 
been digressing, I have always kept strictly to the point. 
Do not judge me as you judged St. Paul's before the roof 
was put on. It is not affairs in France that I have un- 
dertaken to explain, but the affairs of France ; and the af- 
fairs of France are the affairs of Europe. So great is the 
power of the French money, the artifice of their conduct, 
the terror of their arms, that they can bring the greatest 



54 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

kings in Europe to promote their interest and grandeur at 
the expense of their own." 

Defoe delighted to brave common prejudice by throw- 
ing full in its face paradoxes expressed in the most un- 
qualified language. While we were at war with France, 
and commonplace hunters after popularity were doing 
their utmost to flatter the national vanity, Defoe boldly 
announced his intention of setting forth the wonderful 
greatness of the French nation, the enormous numbers of 
their armies, the immense wealth of their treasury, the 
marvellous vigour of their administration. He ridiculed 
loudly those writers who pretended that we should have 
no difficulty in beating them, and filled their papers with 
dismal stories about the poverty and depopulation of the 
country. " Consider the armies that the French King has 
raised," cried Defoe, "and the reinforcements and subsi- 
dies he has sent to the King of Spain ; does that look like 
a depopulated country and an impoverished exchequer?" 
It was perhaps a melancholy fact, bat what need to apolo- 
gise for telling the truth ? At once, of course, a shout 
was raised against him for want of patriotism ; he was a 
French pensioner, a Jacobite, a hireling of the Peace-party. 
This was the opportunity on which the chuckling paradox- 
monger had counted. He protested that he was not draw- 
ing a map of the French power to terrify the English. 
But, he said, " there are two cheats equally hurtful to us ; 
the first to terrify us, the last to make us too easy and 
consequently too secure ; 'tis equally dangerous for us to 
be terrified into despair and bullied into more terror of 
our enemies than we need, or to be so exalted in conceit 
of our own force as to undervalue and contemn the power 
which we cannot reduce." To blame him for making 
clear the greatness of the French power, was to act as if 



iv.] THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. 55 

the Kornans had killed the geese in the Capitol for fright- 
ening them out of their sleep. " If I, like an honest Prot- 
estant goose, have gaggled too loud of the French power, 
and raised the country, the French indeed may have rea- 
son to cut my throat if they could ; but 'tis hard my own 
countrymen, to whom I have shown their danger, and 
whom I have endeavoured to wake out of their sleep, should 
take offence at the timely discovery." 

If we open the first volume, or indeed any volume of 
the Review, at random, we are almost certain to meet with 
some electric shock of paradox designed to arouse the at- 
tention of the torpid. In one number we find the writer, 
ever daring and alert, setting out with an eulosium on 
"the wonderful benefit of arbitrary power" in France. 
He runs on in this vein for some time, accumulating ex- 
amples of the wonderful benefit, till the patience of his 
liberty-loving readers is sufficiently exasperated, and then 
he turns round with a grin of mockery and explains that 
he means benefit to the monarch, not to the subject. "If 
any man ask me what are the benefits of arbitrary power 
to the subject, I answer these two, poverty and subjection." 
But to an ambitious monarch unlimited power is a neces- 
sity ; unless he can count upon instant obedience to his 
will, he only courts defeat if he embarks in schemes of 
aggression and conquest. 

" When a Prince must court his subjects to give him leave 
to raise an army, and when that's clone, tell him when he 
must disband them ; that if he wants money, he must assem- 
ble the States of his country, and not only give them good 
words to get it, and tell them what 'tis for, but give them an 
account how it is expended before he asks for more. The 
subjects in such a government are certainly happy in having 
their property and privileges secured, but if I were of his 



56 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

Privy Council, I would advise such, a Prince to content him- 
self within the compass of his own government, and never 
think of invading his neighbours or increasing his domin- 
ions, for subjects who stipulate with their Princes, and make 
conditions of government, who claim to be governed by laws 
and make those laws themselves, who need not pay their 
money but when they see cause, and may refuse to pay it 
when demanded without their consent; such subjects will 
never empty their purses upon foreign wars for enlarging the 
glory of their sovereign." 

This glory he describes as " the leaf -gold which the devil 
has laid over the backside of ambition, to make it glitter 
to the world." 

Defoe's knowledge of the irritation caused among the 
Dissenters by his Shortest Way, did not prevent him from 
shocking them and annoying the high Tories by similar 
jeux $ esprit. He had no tenderness for the feelings of 
such of his brethren as had not his own robust sense of 
humour and boyish glee in the free handling of dangerous 
weapons. Thus we find him, among his eulogies of the 
Grand Monarque, particularly extolling him for the revo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes. By the expulsion of the 
Protestants, Louis impoverished and unpeopled part of his 
country, but it was "the most politic action the French 
King ever did." " I don't think fit to engage here in a 
dispute about the honesty of it," says Defoe ; " but till 
he had first cleared the country of that numerous injured 
people, he could never have ventured to *carry an offensive 
war into all the borders of Europe." And Defoe was 
not content with shocking the feelings of his nominal co- . 
religionists by a light treatment of matters in which he 
agreed with them. He upheld with all his might the op- 
posite view from theirs on two important questions of for- 



iv.] THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. 61 

eign policy. While the Confederates were doing battle 
on all sides against France, the King of Sweden was mak- 
ing war on his own account against Poland for the avow- 
ed purpose of placing a Protestant prince on the throne. 
Extreme Protestants in England were disposed to think 
that Charles XII. was fighting the Lord's battle in Poland. 
But Defoe was strongly of opinion that the work in which 
all Protestants ought at that moment to be engaged was 
breaking down the power of France, and as Charles re- 
fused to join the Confederacy, and the Catholic prince 
against whom he was fighting was a possible adherent, the 
ardent preacher of union among the Protestant powers in- 
sisted upon regarding him as a practical ally of France, 
and urged that the English fleet should be sent into the 
Baltic to interrupt his communications. Disunion among 
Protestants, argued Defoe, was the main cause of French 
greatness ; if the Swedish King would not join the Con- 
federacy of his own free will, he should be compelled to 
join it, or at least to refrain from weakening it. 

Defoe treated the revolt of the Hungarians against the 
Emperor with the same regard to the interests of the Prot- 
estant cause. Some uneasiness was felt in England at co- 
operating with an ally who so cruelly oppressed his Prot- 
estant subjects, and some scruple of conscience at seeming 
to countenance the oppression. Defoe fully admitted the 
wrongs of the Hungarians, but argued that this was not 
the time for them to press their claims for redress. He 
would not allow that they were justified at such a moment 
in calling in the aid of the Turks against the Emperor. 
"It is not enough that a nation be Protestant and the 
people our friends; if they will join with our enemies, 
they are Papists, Turks, and Heathens, to us." "If the 
Protestants in Hungary will make the Protestant religion 



58 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

in Hungary clash with the Protestant religion in all the 
rest of Europe, we must prefer the major interest to the 
minor." Defoe treats every foreign question from the 
cool high-political point of view, generally taking up a po- 
sition from which he can expose the unreasonableness of 
both sides. In the case of the Cevennois insurgents, one 
party had used the argument that it was unlawful to en- 
courage rebellion even among the subjects of a prince with 
whom we were at war. With this Defoe dealt in one ar- 
ticle, proving with quite a superfluity of illustration that 
we were justified by all the precedents of recent history in 
sending support to the rebellious subjects of Louis XIV. 
It was the general custom of Europe to "assist the mal- 
contents of our neighbours." Then in another article he 
considered whether, being lawful, it was also expedient, 
and he answered this in the negative, treating with scorn 
a passionate appeal for the Cevennois entitled " Europe en- 
slaved if the Camisars are not relieved." " What nonsense 
is this," he cried, " about a poor despicable handful of men 
who have only made a little diversion in the great war !" 
"The haste these men are in to have that done which 
they cannot show us the way to do !" he cried ; and pro- 
ceeded to prove in a minute discussion of conceivable stra- 
tegic movements that it was impossible for us in the cir- 
cumstances to send the Camisards the least relief. 

There is no reference in the Revieio to Defoe's release 
from prison. Two numbers a week were issued with the 
same punctuality before and after, and there is no percep- 
tible difference either in tone or in plan. Before he left 
prison, and before the fall of the high Tory Ministers, he 
had thrown in his lot boldly with the moderate men, and 
he did not identify himself more closely with any political 
section after Harley and Godolphin recognized the value 



iv.] THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRAXCE. 59 

of his support and gave him liberty and pecuniary help. 
In the first number of the Review he had declared his free- 
dom from party ties, and his unreserved adherence to truth 
and the public interest, and he made frequent protestation 
of this independence. " I am not a party man," he kept 
saying ; " at least, I resolve this shall not be a party pa- 
per." In discussing the affairs of France, he took more 
than one side-glance homewards, but always with the pro- 
test that he had no interest to serve but that of his coun- 
try. The absolute power of Louis, for example, furnished 
him with an occasion for lamenting the disunited counsels 
of Her Majesty's Cabinet. Without imitating the despot- 
ic form of the French Government, he said, there are ways 
by which we might secure under our own forms greater 
decision and promptitude on the part of the Executive. 
When Nottingham was dismissed, he rejoiced openly, not 
because the ex-Secretary had been his persecutor, but be- 
cause at last there was unity of views among the Queen's 
Ministers. He joined naturally in the exultation over 
Marlborough's successes, but in the Review, and in his 
Hymn to Victory, separately published, he courteously di- 
verted some part of the credit to the new Ministry. " Her 
Majesty's measures, moved by new and polished councils, 
have been pointed more directly at the root of the French 
power than ever we have seen before. I hope no man will 
suppose I reflect on the memory of King William ; I know 
'tis impossible the Queen should more sincerely wish the 
reduction of France than his late Majesty ; but if it is ex- 
pected I should say he was not worse served, oftener be- 
trayed, and consequently hurried into more mistakes and 
disasters, than Her Majesty now is, this must be by some- 
body who believes I know much less of the public matters 
of those days than I had the honour to be informed of." 



60 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

But this praise, he represented, was not the praise of a par- 
tisan ; it was an honest compliment wrung from a man 
whose only connexion with the Government was a bond 
for his good behaviour, an undertaking " not to write what 
some people might not like." 

Defoe's hand being against every member of the writ- 
ing brotherhood, it was natural that his reviews should 
not pass without severe criticisms. He often complained 
of the insults, ribaldry, Billingsgate, and Bear-garden lan- 
guage to which he was exposed ; and some of his biogra- 
phers have taken these lamentations seriously, and express- 
ed their regret that so good a man should have been so 
much persecuted. But as he deliberately provoked these 
assaults, and never missed a chance of effective retort, it 
is difficult to sympathise with him on any ground but his 
manifest delight in the strife of tongues. Infinitely the 
superior of his antagonists in power, he could affect to 
treat them with good humour, but this good humour was 
not easy to reciprocate when combined with an impertur- 
bable assumption that they were all fools or knaves. 
When we find him, after humbly asking pardon for all 
his errors of the press, errors of the pen, or errors of opin- 
ion, expressing a wish that " all gentlemen on the other 
side would give him equal occasion to honour them for 
their charity, temper, and gentlemanlike dealing, as for 
their learning and virtue," and offering to " capitulate with 
them, and enter into a treaty or cartel for exchange of 
good language," we may, if we like, admire his superior 
mastery of the weapons of irritation, but pity is out of 
place. 

The number of February 17, 1705, was announced by 
Defoe as being " the last Review of this volume, and de- 
signed to be so of this work." But on the following 



iv.] THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE. 61 

Tuesday, the regular day for the appearance of the Re- 
view, he issued another number, declaring that he could 
not quit the volume without some remarks on "charity 
and poverty." On Saturday yet another last number ap- 
peared, dealing with some social subjects which he had 
been urged by correspondents to discuss. Then on Tues- 
day, February 27, apologising for the frequent turning of 
his design, he issued a Preface to a new volume of the Re- 
view, with a slight change of title. He would overtake 
sooner or later all the particulars of French greatness 
w T hich he had promised to survey, but as the course of his 
narrative had brought him to England, and he might stay 
there for some time, it was as w T ell that this should be in- 
dicated in the title, which was henceforth to be A Review 
of the Affairs of France, with Observations on Affairs at 
Home. He had intended, he said, to abandon the work 
altogether, but some gentlemen had prevailed with him to 
go on, and had promised that he should not be at a loss 
by it. It was now to be issued three times a week. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION. 

In putting forth the prospectus of the second volume of 
his Review, Defoe intimated that its prevailing topic 
would be the Trade of England — a vast subject, with many 
branches, all closely interwoven with one another and with 
the general well-being of the kingdom. It grieved him, 
he said, to see the nation involved in such evils while rem- 
edies lay at hand which blind guides could not, and wick- 
ed guides would not, see — trade decaying, yet within reach 
of the greatest improvements, the navy flourishing, yet 
fearfully mismanaged, rival factions brawling and fight- 
ing when they ought to combine for the common good. 
" Nothing could have induced him to undertake the un- 
grateful office of exposing these things, but the full per- 
suasion that he was capable of convincing anything of an 
Englishman that had the least angle of his soul untainted 
with partiality, and that had the least concern left for the 
good of his country, that even the worst of these evils 
were easy to be cured ; that if ever this nation were ship- 
wrecked and undone, it must be at the very entrance of 
her port of deliverance, in the sight of her safety that 
Providence held out to her, in the sight of her safe estab- 
lishment, a prosperous trade, a regular, easily - supplied 



chap, v.] THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION. 63 

navy, and a general reformation both in manners and 
methods in Church and State." 

Defoe began as usual by laying down various clear 
heads, under which he promised to deal with the whole 
field of trade. But as usual he did not adhere to this sys- 
tematic plan. He discussed some topics of the day with 
brilliant force, and then he suddenly digressed to a sub- 
ject only collaterally connected with trade. The Queen, in 
opening the session of 1704-5, had exhorted her Parlia- 
ment to peace and union ; but the High-Churchmen were 
too hot to listen to advice even from her. The Occasional 
Conformity Bill was again introduced and carried in the 
Commons. The Lords rejected it. The Commons per- 
sisted, and to secure the passing of the measure, tacked it 
to a Bill of Supply. The Lords refused to pass the Money 
Bill till the tack was withdrawn. Soon afterwards the 
Parliament — Parliaments were then triennial — was dis- 
solved, and the canvass for a general election set in amidst 
unusual excitement. Defoe abandoned the quiet topic of 
trade, and devoted the Review to electioneering articles. 

But he did not take a side, at least not a party side. 
He took the side of peace and his country. " I saw with 
concern," he said, in afterwards explaining his position, 
" the weighty juncture of a new election for members ap- 
proach, the variety of wheels and engines set to work in 
the nation, and the furious methods to form interests on 
either hand and put the tempers of men on all sides into 
an unusual motion ; and things seemed acted with so much 
animosity and party fury that I confess it gave me terrible 
apprehensions of the consequences." On both sides " the 
methods seemed to him very scandalous." " In many 
places most horrid and villainous practices were set on foot 
to supplant one another. The parties stooped to vile and 



64 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

unbecoming meannesses ; infinite briberies, forgeries, per- 
juries, and all manner of debauchings of the principles and 
manners of the electors were attempted. All sorts of vio- 
lences, tumults, riots, breaches of the peace, neighbour- 
hood, and good manners were made use of to support in- 
terests and carry elections." In short, Defoe saw the na- 
tion "running directly on the steep precipice of confu- 
sion." In these circumstances, he seriously reflected what 
he should do. He came to the conclusion that he must 
" immediately set himself in the Review to exhort, per- 
suade, entreat, and in the most moving terms he was capa- 
ble of, prevail on all people in general to study Peace." 

Under cover of this profession of impartiality, Defoe is- 
sued most effective attacks upon the High-Church party. 
In order to promote peace, he said, it was necessary to 
ascertain first of all who were the enemies of peace. On 
the surface, the questions at stake in the elections were the 
privileges of the Dissenters and the respective rights of 
the Lords and the Commons in the matter of Money Bills. 
But people must look beneath the surface. "King James, 
French power, and a general turn of affairs was at the bot- 
tom, and the quarrels between Church and Dissenters only 
a politic noose they had hooked the parties on both sides 
into." Defoe lashed the Tackers into fury by his exhor- 
tations to the study of peace. He professed the utmost 
good -will to them personally, though he had not words 
strong enough to condemn their conduct in tacking the 
Occasional Bill to a Money Bill when they knew that the 
Lords would reject it, and so in a moment of grave na- 
tional peril leave the army without supplies. The Queen, 
in dissolving Parliament, had described this tacking as a 
dangerous experiment, and Defoe explained the experi- 
ment as being " whether losing the Money Bill, breaking 



v.] THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION. 65 

up the Houses, disbanding the Confederacy, and opening 
the door to the French, might not have been for the inter- 
est of the High-Church." Far be it from him to use Bil- 
lingsgate language to the Tackers, but " the effect of their 
action, which, and not their motive, he had to consider, 
would undoubtedly be to let in the French, depose the 
Queen, bring in the Prince of Wales, abdicate the Prot- 
estant religion, restore Popery, repeal the Toleration, and 
persecute the Dissenters." Still it was probable that the 
Tackers meant no harm. Humanum est errare. He was 
certain that if he showed them their error, they would re- 
pent and be converted. All the same, he could not recom- 
mend them to the electors. " A Tacker is a man of pas- 
sion, a man of heat, a man that is for ruining the nation 
upon any hazards to obtain his ends. Gentlemen free- 
holders, you must not choose a Tacker, unless you will de- 
stroy our peace, divide our strength, pull down the Church, 
let in the French, and depose the Queen." 

From the dissolution of Parliament in April till the end 
of the year Defoe preached from this text with infinite 
variety and vigour. It is the chief subject of the second 
volume of the Review, The elections, powerfully influ- 
enced by Marlborough's successes as well as by the elo- 
quent championship of Defoe, resulted in the entire defeat 
of the High Tories, and a further weeding of them out 
of high places in the Administration. Defoe was able to 
close this volume of the Review with expressions of delight 
at the attainment of the peace for which he had laboured, 
and, the victory being gained and the battle over, to prom- 
ise a return to the intermitted subject of Trade. He re- 
turned to this subject in the beginning of his third vol- 
ume. But he had not pursued it long when he was again 
called away. The second diversion, as he pointed out, was 

4 



66 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

strictly analogous to the first. It was a summons to him 
to do his utmost to promote the union of the two king- 
doms of England and Scotland. " From the same zeal," 
Defoe said, "with which I first pursued this blessed sub- 
ject of peace, I found myself embarked in the further ex- 
tent of it, I mean the Union. If I thought myself obliged 
in duty to the public interest to use my utmost endeavour 
to quiet the minds of enraged parties, I found myself un- 
der a stronger necessity to embark in the same design be- 
tween two most enraged nations." 

The union of the two kingdoms had become an object 
of pressing and paramount importance towards the close 
of William's reign. He had found little difficulty in get- 
ting the English Parliament to agree to settle the succes- 
sion of the House of Hanover, but the proposal that the 
succession to the throne of Scotland should be settled on 
the same head was coldly received by the Scottish Parlia- 
ment. It was not so much that the politicians of Edin- 
burgh were averse to a common settlement, or positively 
eager for a King and Court of their own, but they were 
resolved to hold back till they were assured of commer- 
cial privileges which would go to compensate them for the 
drain of wealth that was supposed to have followed the 
King southwards. This was the policy of the wiser heads, 
not to accept the Union without as advantageous terms as 
they could secure. They had lost an opportunity at the 
Ee volution, and were determined not to lose another. But 
among the mass of the population the feeling was all in 
favour of a separate kingdom. National animosity had 
been inflamed to a passionate pitch by the Darien disas- 
ter and the Massacre of Glencoe. The people listened 
readily to the insinuations of hot-headed men that the 
English wished to have everything their own way. The 



v.] THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION. 67 

counter -charge about the Scotch found equally willing- 
hearers among the mass in England. Never had cool- 
headed statesmen a harder task in preventing two nations 
from coming to blows. All the time that the Treaty of 
Union was being negotiated which King William had 
earnestly urged from his deathbed, throughout the first 
half of Queen Anne's reign they worked under a continual 
apprehension lest the negotiations should end in a violent 
and irreconcilable rupture. 

Defoe might well say that he was pursuing the same 
blessed subject of Peace in trying to reconcile these two 
most enraged nations, and writing with all his might for 
the Union. An Act enabling the Queen to appoint Com- 
missioners on the Enolish side to arrange the terms of the 
. Treaty had been passed in the first year of her reign, but 
difficulties had arisen about the appointment of the Scot- 
tish Commissioners, and it was not till the Spring of 1706 
that the two Commissions came together. When they did 
at last meet, they found each other much more reasonable 
and practical in spirit than had appeared possible during 
the battle over the preliminaries. Put while the states- 
men sat concocting the terms of the Treaty almost amica- 
bly, from April to July, the excitement raged fiercely out 
of doors. Amidst the blaze of recriminations and counter- 
recriminations, Defoe moved energetically as the Apostle 
of Peace, making his Hevieio . iplaj like a fireman's hose 
upon the flames. He did not try to persuade the Scotch 
to peace by the same methods which he had used in the 
case of the High-fliers and Tackers. His Reviews on this 
subject, full of spirit as ever, are models of the art of con- 
ciliation. He wrestled ardently with national prejudices 
on both sides, 1 vindicating the Scotch Presbyterians from 
the charge of religious intolerance, labouring to prove that 



68 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

the English were not all to blame for the collapse of the 
Darien expedition and the Glencoe tragedy, expounding 
what was fair to both nations in matters concerning trade. 
Abuse was heaped upon him plentifully by hot partisans ; 
he was charged with want of patriotism from the one side, 
and with too much of it from the other; but he held on 
his way manfully, allowing no blow from his aspersers to 
pass unreturned. Seldom has so bold and skilful a soldier 
been enlisted in the cause of peace. 

Defoe was not content with the Review as a literary in- 
strument of pacification. He carried on the war in both 
capitals, answering the pamphlets of the Scotch patriots 
with counter-pamphlets from the Edinburgh press. He 
published also a poem, " in honour of Scotland," entitled 
Caledonia, with an artfully flattering preface, in which he 
declared the poem to be a simple tribute to the greatness 
of the people and the country without any reference what- 
ever to the Union. Presently he found it expedient to 
make Edinburgh his head- quarters, though he continued 
sending the Review three times a week to his London 
printer. When the Treaty of Union had been elaborated 
by the Commissioners and had passed the English Parlia- 
ment, its difficulties were not at an end. It had still to 
pass the Scotch Parliament, and a strong faction there, 
riding on the storm of popular excitement, insisted on dis- 
cussing it clause by clause. Moved partly by curiosity, 
partly by earnest desire for the public good, according to 
his own account in the Review and in his History of the 
Union, Defoe resolved to undertake the " long, tedious, 
and hazardous journey " to Edinburgh, and use all his in- 
fluence to push the Treaty through. It was a task of no 
small danger, for the prejudice against the Union went so 
high in the Scottish capital that he ran the risk of being 



v.] THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION. 69 

torn to pieces by the populace. In one riot of which he 
gives an account, his lodging was beset, and for a time he 
was in as much peril " as a grenadier on a counter-scarp." 
Still he went on writing pamphlets, and lobbying members 
of Parliament. Owing to his intimate knowledge of all 
matters relating to trade, he also " had the honour to be 
frequently sent for into the several Committees of Parlia- 
ment which were appointed to state some difficult points 
relating to equalities, taxes, prohibitions, &c." Even when 
the Union was agreed to by the Parliaments of both king- 
doms, and took effect formally in May, 1707, difficulties 
arose in putting the details in operation, and Defoe pro- 
longed his stay in Scotland through the whole of that 
year. 

In this visit to Scotland Defoe protested to the world at 
the time that he had gone as a diplomatist on his own ac- 
count, purely in the interests of peace. But a suspicion 
arose and was very free expressed, that both in this jour- 
ney and in previous journeys to the West and the North 
of England during the elections, he was serving as the 
agent, if not as the spy, of the Government. These re- 
proaches he denied with indignation, declaring it particu- 
larly hard that he should be subjected to such despiteful 
and injurious treatment even by writers " embarked in the 
same cause, and pretending to write for the same public 
good." " I contemn," he said in his History, " as not 
worth mentioning, the suggestions of some people, of my 
being employed thither to carry on the interest of a party. 
I have never loved any parties, but with my utmost zeal 
have sincerely espoused the great and original interest of 
this nation, and of all nations — I mean truth and liberty, — 
and whoever are of that party, I desire to be with them." 
He took up the same charges more passionately in the 



10 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

Preface to the third volume of the Review, and dealt with 
them in some brilliant passages of apologetic eloquence. 

" I must confess," he said, " I have sometimes thought it 
very hard, that having voluntarily, without the least direc- 
tion, assistance, or encouragement, in spite of all that has 
been suggested, taken upon me the most necessary work of 
removing national prejudices against the two most capital 
blessings of the world, Peace and Union, I should have the 
disaster to have the nations receive the doctrine and damn 
the teacher. 

" Should I descend to particulars, it would hardly appear 
credible that in a Christian, a Protestant, and a Keformed 
nation, any man should receive such treatment as I have 
done, even from those very people w T hose consciences and 
judgments have stooped to the venerable truth, owned it 
has been useful, serviceable, and seasonable. . . . 

" I am charged with partiality, bribery, pensions, and pay- 
ments — a thing the circumstances, family, and fortunes of a 
man devoted to his country's peace clears me of. If paid, 
gentlemen, for writing, if hired, if employed, why still har- 
assed with merciless and malicious men, why pursued to all 
extremities by law for old accounts, which you clear other 
men of every day ? Why oppressed, distressed, and driven 
from his family and from all his prospects of delivering them 
or himself? Is this the fate of men employed and hired? 
Is this the figure the agents of Courts and Princes make ? 
Certainly had I been hired or employed, those people who 
own the service would by this time have set their servant 
free from the little and implacable malice of litigious perse- 
cutions, murthering warrants, and men w T hose mouths are to 
be stopt by trifles. Let this suffice to clear me of all the lit- 
tle and scandalous charges of being hired and employed." 

But then, people ask, if he was not officially employed^ 
what had he to do w T ith these affairs ? Why should he 
meddle with them ? To this he answers : — 



v.] THE ADVOCATE QF PEACE AND UNION. 11 

" Truly, gentlemen, this is just the case. I saw a parcel of 
pecrple caballing together to ruin property, corrupt the laws, 
invade the Government, debauch the people, and in short, en- 
slave and embroil the nation, and I cried ' Fire I' or rather I 
cried ' Water !' for the fire was begun already. I see all the 
nation running into confusions and directly flying in the face 
of one another, and cried out c Peace !' I called upon all sorts 
of people that had any senses to collect them together and 
judge for themselves what they were going to do, and ex- 
cited them to lay hold of the madmen and take from them 
the wicked weapon, the knife with which they were going to 
destroy their mother, rip up the bowels of their country, and 
at last effectually ruin themselves. 

" And what had I to do with this ? Why, yes, gentlemen, 
I had the same right as every man that has a footing in his 
country, or that has a posterity to possess liberty and claim 
right, must have, to preserve the laws, liberty, and government 
of that country to which he belongs, and he that charges me 
with meddling in what does not concern me, meddles him- 
self with what 'tis plain he does not understand." 

" I am not the first," Defoe said in another place, " that 
has been stoned for saying the truth. I cannot but think 
that as time and the conviction of their senses will restore 
men to love the peace now established in this nation, so 
they will gradually see I have acted no part but that of a 
lover of my country, and an honest man." 

Time has undeniably shown that in these efforts to pro- 
mote party peace and national union Defoe acted like a 
lover of his country, and that his aims were the aims of a 
statesmanlike as well as an honest man. And yet his prot- 
estations of independence and spontaneity of action, with 
all their ring of truth and all their solemnity of assevera- 
tion, were merely diplomatic blinds. He was all the time, 
as he afterwards admitted, when the admission could do 



72 DANIEL DEFOE, [chap, t, 

no harm except to his own passing veracity, acting as the 
agent of Harley, and in enjoyment of an "appointment" 
from the Queen. What exactly the nature of his secret 
services in Scotland and elsewhere were, he very properly 
refused to reveal. His business probably was to ascertain 
and report the opinions of influential persons, and keep the 
Government informed as far as he could of the general 
state of feeling. At any rate it was not as he alleged, 
mere curiosity, or the fear of his creditors, or private en- 
terprise, or pure and simple patriotic zeal that took Defoe 
to Scotland. The use he made of his debts as diplomatic 
instruments is curious. He not merely practised his fac- 
ulties in the management of his creditors, which one of 
Lord Beaeonsfield's characters commends as an incompara- 
ble means to a sound knowledge of human nature ; but he 
made his debts actual pieces in his political game. His 
poverty, apparent, if not real, served as a screen for his em- 
ployment under Government. When he was despatched 
on secret missions, he could depart wiping his eyes at the 
hardship of having to flee from his creditors. 



CHAPTER VI. 

DR. SACHEVERELL, AND THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 

Some of Defoe's biographers have claimed for hirn that he 
anticipated the doctrines of Free Trade. This is an error. 
It is true that Defoe was never tired of insisting, in pam- 
phlets, books, and number after number of the Review, on 
the all-importance of trade to the nation. Trade was the 
foundation of England's greatness ; success in trade was the 
most honourable patent of nobility ; next to the mainten- 
ance of the Protestant religion, the encouragement of trade 
should be the chief care of English statesmen. On these 
heads Defoe's enthusiasm was boundless, and his eloquence 
inexhaustible. It is true also that he supported with all 
his might the commercial clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht, 
which sought to abolish the prohibitory duties on our trade 
with France. It is this last circumstance which has earned 
for him the repute of being a pioneer of Free Trade. But 
his title to that repute does not bear examination. He was 
not so far in advance of his age as to detect the fallacy 
of the mercantile system. On the contrary, he avowed his 
adherence to it against those of his contemporaries who 
were inclined to call it in question. How Defoe came to 
support the new commercial treaty with France, and the 
grounds on which he supported it, can only be understood 
by looking at his relations with the Government. 

4* 



U DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

While Defoe was living in Scotland in 1707, and fill- 
ing the Review so exclusively with Scotch affairs that his 
readers, according to his own account, began to say that 
the fellow could talk of nothing but the Union, and had 
grown mighty dull of late, Harley's position in the Min- 
istry was gradually becoming very insecure. He was sus- 
pected of cooling in his zeal for the war, and of keep- 
ing up clandestine relations with the Tories ; and when 
Marlborough returned from his campaign at the close of 
the year he insisted upon the Secretary's dismissal. The 
Queen, who secretly resented the Marlborough yoke, at 
first refused her consent. Presently an incident occurred 
which gave them an excuse for more urgent pressure. One 
Gregg, a clerk in Harley's office, was discovered to be in 
secret correspondence with the French Court, furnishing 
Louis with the contents of important State papers. Har- 
ley was charged with complicity. This charge was ground- 
less, but he could not acquit himself of gross negligence in 
the custody of his papers. Godolphin and Marlborough 
threatened to resign unless he was dismissed. Then the 
Queen yielded. 

When Harley fell, Defoe, according to his own account, 
in the Appeal to Honour and Justice, looked upon him- 
self as lost, taking it for granted that " when a great 
officer fell, all who came in by his interest fall with him." 
But when his benefactor heard of this, and of Defoe's 
" resolution never to abandon the fortunes of the man to 
whom he owed so much," he kindly urged the devoted 
follower to think rather of his own interest than of any 
romantic obligation. " My lord Treasurer," he said, " will 
employ you in nothing but what is for the public service, 
and agreeably to your own sentiments of things ; and be- 
sides, it is the Queen you are serving, who has been very 



ti.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERXMEXT. 75 

good to you. Pray apply yourself as you used to do ; I 
shall uot take it ill from you in the least." To Godolphin 
accordingly Defoe applied himself, was by him introduced 
a second time to Her Majesty and to the honour of kiss- 
ing her hand, and obtained "the continuance of an ap- 
pointment which Her Majesty had been pleased to make 
him in consideration of a former special service he had 
done." This was the appointment which he held while 
he was challenging his enemies to say whether his outward 
circumstances looked like the figure the agents of Courts 
and Princes make. 

The services on which Defoe was employed were, as 
before, of two kinds, active and literary. Shortly after 
the change in the Ministry early in 1708, news came of 
the gathering of the French expedition at Dunkirk, with 
a view, it was suspected, of trying to effect a landing in 
Scotland. Defoe was at once despatched to Edinburgh 
on an errand which, he says, was "far from being unfit 
for a sovereign to direct or an honest man to perform." 
If his duties were to mix with the people and ascertain the 
state of public feeling, and more specifically to sound sus- 
pected characters, to act, in short, as a political detective 
or spy, the service was one which it was essential that the 
Government should get some trustworthy person to under- 
take, and which any man at such a crisis might perform, 
if he could, without any discredit to his honesty or his 
patriotism. The independence of the sea-girt realm was 
never in greater peril. The French expedition was a well- 
conceived diversion, and it was imperative that the Gov- 
ernment should know on what amount of support the 
invaders might rely in the bitterness prevailing in Scot- 
land after the Union. Fortunately the loyalty of the 
Scotch Jacobites was not put to the test. As in the case 



76 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

of the Spanish Armada, accident fought on our side. The 
French fleet succeeded in reaching the coast of Scotland 
before the ships of the defenders ; but it overshot its 
arranged landing-point, and had no hope but to sail back 
ingloriously to Dunkirk. Meantime, Defoe had satisfacto- 
rily discharged himself of his mission. Godolphin showed 
his appreciation of his services by recalling him as soon 
as Parliament was dissolved, to travel through the counties 
and serve the cause of the Government in the general elec- 
tions. He was frequently sent to Scotland again on simi- 
larly secret errands, and seems to have established a print- 
ing business there, made arrangements for the simultane- 
ous issue of the Review in Edinburgh and London, besides 
organizing Edinburgh newspapers, executing commissions 
for English merchants, and setting on foot a linen manu- 
factory. 

But we are more concerned with the literary labors 
of this versatile and indefatigable genius. These, in the 
midst of his multifarious commercial and diplomatic con- 
cerns, he never intermitted. All the time the Review con- 
tinued to give a brilliant support to the Ministry. The 
French expedition had lent a new interest to the affairs of 
Scotland, and Defoe advertised, that though he never in- 
tended to make the Review a newspaper, circumstances 
enabled him to furnish exceptionally correct intelligence 
from Scotland as well as sound impartial opinions. The 
intelligence which he communicated was all with a pur- 
pose, and a good purpose — the promotion of a better un- 
derstanding between the united nations. He never had a 
better opportunity for preaching from his favourite text of 
Peace and Union, and he used it characteristically, cham- 
pioning the cause of the Scotch Presbyterians, asserting 
the firmness of their loyalty, smoothing over trading griev- 



vi.] THE CHANGE OE GOVERNMENT. 11 

ances by showing elaborately how both sides benefited 
from the arrangements of the Union, launching shafts in 
every direction at his favourite butts, and never missing a 
chance of exulting in his own superior wisdom. In what 
a posture would England have been now, he cried, if those 
wiseacres had been listened to, who were for trusting the 
defence of England solely to the militia and the fleet! 
Would our fleet have kept the French from landing if 
Providence had not interposed; and if they had landed, 
would a militia, undermined by disaffection, have been 
able to beat them back? The French king deserved a 
vote of thanks for opening the eyes of the nation against 
foolish advisers, and for helping it to heal internal divis- 
ions. Louis, poor gentleman, was much to be pitied, for 
his informers had evidently served him badly, and had led 
him to expect a greater amount of support from disloyal 
factions than they had the will or the courage to give him. 
During the electoral canvass, Defoe surpassed himself in 
the lively vigour of his advocacy of the Whig cause. " And 
now, gentlemen of England," he began in the Review — as 
it went on he became more and more direct and familiar 
in his manner of addressing his readers — "noAV we are 
a-going to choose Parliament men, I will tell you a story." 
And he proceeded to tell how in a certain borough a great 
patron procured the election of a " shock dog " as its par- 
liamentary representative. Money and ale, Defoe says, 
could do anything. " God knows I speak it with regret 
for you all and for your posterity, it is not an impossi- 
ble thing to debauch this nation into a choice of thieves, 
knaves, devils, shock dogs, or anything comparatively 
speaking, by the power of various intoxications." He 
spent several numbers of the Review in an ironical advice 
to the electors to choose Tories, showing with all his skill 



78 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

" the mighty and prevailing reason why we should have a 
Tory Parliament." " O gentlemen," he cried, " if we have 
any mind to buy some more experience, be sure and choose 
Tories." " We want a little instruction, we want to go to 
school to knaves and fools." Afterwards, dropping this 
thin mask, he declared that among the electors only " the 
drunken, the debauched, the swearing, the persecuting" 
would vote for the High-fliers. " The grave, the sober, the 
thinking, the prudent," would vote for the Whigs. " A 
House of Tories is a House of Devils." " If ever we have 
a Tory Parliament, the nation is undone." In his Appeal 
to Honour and Justice Defoe explained, that while he was 
serving Godolphin, " being resolved to remove all possible 
ground of suspicion that he kept any secret correspondence, 
he never visited, or wrote to, or any way corresponded 
with his principal benefactor for above three years." See- 
ing that Harley was at that time the leader of the party 
which Defoe was denouncing with such spirit, it would 
have been strange indeed if there had been much inter- 
course between them. 

Though regarded after his fall from office as the natu- 
ral leader of the Tory party, Harley was a very reserved 
politician, who kept his own counsel, used instruments of 
many shapes and sizes, steered clear of entangling engage- 
ments, and left himself free to take advantage of various 
opportunities. To wage war against the Ministry was the 
work of more ardent partisans. He stood by and waited 
while Bolingbroke and Rochester and their allies in the 
press cried out that the Government was now in the hands 
of the enemies of the Church, accused the Whigs of pro- 
tracting the war to fill their own pockets with the plun- 
der of the Supplies, and called upon the nation to put an 
end to their jobbery and mismanagement. The victory of 



ti.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 79 

Oudenarde in the summer of 1708 gave them a new han- 
dle. " What is the good," they cried, " of these glorious 
victories, if they do not bring peace ? What do we gain 
by beating the French in campaign after campaign, if we 
never bring them nearer to submission ? It is incredible 
that the French King is not willing to make peace, if the 
Whigs did not profit too much by the war to give peace 
any encouragement." To these arguments for peace, De- 
foe opposed himself steadily in the Review. " Well, gen- 
tlemen," he began, when the news came of the battle of 
Oudenarde, " have the French noosed themselves again ? 
Let us pray the Duke of Marlborough that a speedy peace 
may not follow, for what would become of us V He was 
as willing for a peace on honourable terms as any man, but 
a peace till the Protestant Succession was secured and the 
balance of power firmly settled, " would be fatal to peace 
at home." " If that fatal thing called Peace abroad should 
happen, we shall certainly be undone." Presently, how- 
ever, the French King began to make promising overtures 
for peace ; the Ministry, in hopes of satisfactory terms, 
encouraged them ; the talk through the nation was all of 
peace, and the Whigs contented themselves with passing 
an address to the Crown through Parliament urging the 
Queen to make no peace till the Pretender should be dis- 
owned by the French Court, and the Succession guaran- 
teed by a compact with the Allies. Throughout the win- 
ter the Review expounded with brilliant clearness the only 
conditions on which an honourable peace could be founded, 
and prepared the nation to doubt the sincerity with which 
Louis had entered into negotiations. Much dissatisfaction 
was felt, and that dissatisfaction was eagerly fanned by the 
Tories when the negotiations fell through, in consequence 
of the distrust with which the allies regarded Louis, and 



80 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

their imposing upon him too hard a test of his honesty. 
Defoe fought vigorously against the popular discontent. 
The charges against Marlborough were idle rhodomontade. 
We had no reason to be discouraged with the progress of 
the war unless we had formed extravagant expectations. 
Though the French King's resources had been enfeebled, 
and he might reasonably have been expected to desire 
peace, he did not care for the welfare of France so much 
as for his own glory ; he would fight to gain his purpose 
while there was a pistole in his treasury, and we must not 
expect Paris to be taken in a week. Nothing could be 
more admirable than Godolphin's management of our own 
Treasury ; he deserved almost more credit than the Duke 
himself. " Your Treasurer has been your general of gen- 
erals ; without his exquisite management of the cash the 
Duke of Marlborough must have been beaten." 

The Sacheverell incident, which ultimately led to the 
overthrow of the Ministry, gave Defoe a delightful open- 
ing for writing in their defence. A collection of his arti- 
cles on this subject would show his controversial style at 
its best and brightest. Sacheverell and he were old an- 
tagonists. Sacheverell's " bloody flag and banner of defi- 
ance," and other High-flying truculencies, had furnished 
him with the main basis of his Shortest Way luith the 
Dissenters. The laugh of the populace was then on De- 
foe's side, partly, perhaps, because the Government had 
prosecuted him. But in the changes of the troubled 
times, the Oxford Doctor, nurtured in " the scolding of 
the ancients," had found a more favourable opportunity. 
His literary skill was of the most mechanical kind ; but at 
the close of 1709, when hopes of peace had been raised 
only to be disappointed, and the country, was suffering 
from the distress of a prolonged war, people were more in 



vl] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 81 

a mood to listen to a preacher who disdained to check the 
sweep of his rhetoric by qualifications or abatements, and 
luxuriated in denouncing the Queen's Ministers from the 
pulpit under scriptural allegories. He delivered a tremen- 
dous philippic about the Perils of False Brethren, as a ser- 
mon before the Lord Mayor in November. It would have 
been a wise thing for the Ministry to have left Sacheverell 
to be dealt with by their supporters in the press and in 
the pulpit. But in an evil hour Godolphin, stung by a 
nickname thrown at him by the rhetorical priest — a singu- 
larly comfortable-looking man to have so virulent a tongue, 
one of those orators who thrive on ill-conditioned lan<niao;e 
— resolved, contrary to the advice of more judicious col- 
leagues, to have him impeached by the House of Com- 
mons. The Commons readily voted the sermon seditious, 
scandalous, and malicious, and agreed to a resolution for 
his impeachment ; the Lords ordered that the case should 
be heard at their bar ; and Westminster Hall was prepared 
to be the scene of a great public trial. At first Defoe, in 
heaping contemptuous ridicule upon the High-flying Doc- 
tor, had spoken as if he would consider prosecution a blun- 
der. The man ought rather to be encouraged to go on 
exposing himself and his party. " Let him go on," he 
said, " to bully Moderation, explode Toleration, and damn 
the Union ; the gain will be ours." 

" You should use him as we do a hot horse. When he 
first frets and pulls, keep a stiff rein and hold him in if you 
can ; but if he grows mad and furious, slack your hand, clap 
your heels to him, and let him go. Give him his belly full 
of it. Away goes the beast like a fury over hedge and ditch, 
till he runs himself off his mettle ; perhaps bogs himself, and 
then he grows quiet of course. . . . Besides, good people, do 
you not know the nature of the barking creatures ? If you 



82 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

pass but by, and take no notice, they will yelp and make a 
noise, and perhaps run a little after you ; but turn back, offer 
to strike them or throw stones at them, and you'll never have 
done — nay, you'll raise all the dogs of the parish upon you." 

This last was precisely what the Government did, and 
they found reason to regret that they did not take Defoe's 
advice and let Sacheverell alone. When, however, they 
did resolve to prosecute him, Defoe immediately turned 
round, and exulted in the prosecution, as the very thing 
which he had foreseen. " Was not the Review right when 
he said you ought to let such people run on till they 
were out of breath ? Did I not note to you that precipi- 
tations have always ruined them and served us ? . . . Not 
a hound in the pack opened like him. He has done the 
work effectually. . . . He has raised the house and waked 
the landlady. . . . Thank him, good people, thank him 
and clap him on the back ; let all his party do but this, 
and the day is our own." Nor did Defoe omit to remind 
the good people that he had been put in the pillory for 
satirically hinting that the High-Church favored such doc- 
trines as Sacheverell was now prosecuted for. In his 
Hymn to the Pillory he had declared that Sacheverell 
ought to stand there in his place. His wish was now grat- 
ified ; " the bar of the House of Commons is the worst 
pillory in the nation." In the two months which elapsed 
before the trial, during which the excitement was steadily 
growing, Sacheverell and his doctrines were the main topic 
of the Review. If a popular tempest could have been al- 
layed by brilliant argument, Defoe's papers ought to have 
done it. He was a manly antagonist, and did not imitate 
coarser pamphleteers in raking up scandals about the Doc- 
tor's private life — at least not under his own name. There 
was, indeed, a pamphlet issued by " a Gentleman of Ox- 



ti.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 83 

ford," which bears many marks of Defoe's authorship, and 
contains an account of some passages in Sacheverell's life 
not at all to the clergyman's credit. But the only pam- 
phlet outside the Review which the biographers have as- 
cribed to Defoe's activity, is a humorous Letter from the 
Pope to Don Sacheverellio, giving him instructions how to 
advance the interest of the Pretender. In the Review De- 
foe, treating Sacheverell with riotously mirthful contempt, 
calls for the punishment of the doctrines rather than the 
man. During the trial, which lasted more than a fort- 
night, a mob attended the Doctor's carriage every day 
from his lodgings in the Temple to Westminster Hall, huz- 
zaing, and pressing to kiss his hand, and spent the even- 
ings in rabbling the Dissenters' meeting-houses, and hoot- 
ing before the residences of prominent Whigs. Defoe 
had always said that the High-fliers would use violence 
to their opponents if they had the power, and here was a 
confirmation of his' opinion on which he did not fail to 
insist. The sentence on Sacheverell, that his sermon and 
vindication should be burnt by the common hangman and 
himself suspended from preaching for three years, was 
hailed by the mob as an acquittal, and celebrated by tu- 
multuous gatherings and bonfires. Defoe reasoned hard 
and joyfully to prove that the penalty was everything that 
could be wished, and exactly what he had all along advised 
and contemplated, but he did not succeed in persuading 
the masses that the Government had not suffered a defeat. 
The impeachment of Sacheverell turned popular feeling 
violently against the Whigs. The break up of the Ger- 
truydenberg Conference without peace gave a strong push 
in the same direction. It was all due, the Tories shouted, 
and the people were now willing to believe, to the folly of 
our Government in insisting upon impossible conditions 



84 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

from the French King, and their shameless want of patri- 
otism in consulting the interests of the Allies rather than 
of England. The Queen, who for some time had been 
longing to get rid of her Whig Ministers, did not at once 
set sail with this breeze. She dismissed the Earl of Sun- 
derland in June, and sent word to her allies that she meant 
to make no further changes. Their ambassadors, with 
what was even then resented as an impertinence, congratu- 
lated her on this resolution, and then in August she took 
the momentous step of dismissing Godolphin, and putting 
the Treasury nominally in commission, but really under 
the management of Harley. For a few weeks it seems to 
have been Harley's wish to conduct the administration in 
concert with the remaining Whig members, but the ex- 
treme Tories, with whom he had been acting, overbore his 
moderate intentions. They threatened to desert him un- 
less he broke clearly and definitely with the Whigs. In 
October accordingly the Whigs were all turned out of the 
Administration, Tories put in their places, Parliament dis- 
solved, and writs issued for new elections. " So sudden 
and entire a change of the Ministry," Bishop Burnet re- 
marks, " is scarce to be found in our history, especially 
where men of great abilities had served both with zeal and 
success.*" That the Queen should dismiss one or all of her 
Ministers in the face of a Parliamentary majority excited 
no surprise ; but that the whole Administration should be 
changed at a stroke from one party to the other was a new 
and strange thing. The old Earl of Sunderland's suggest- 
ion to William III. had not taken root in constitutional 
practice ; this was the fulfilment of it under the gradual 
pressure of circumstances. 

Defoe's conduct while the political balance was rocking, 
and after the Whig side had decisively kicked the beam, 



vi. ] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 85 

is a curious study. One hardly knows which to admire 
most, the loyalty with which he stuck to the falling house 
till the moment of its collapse, or the adroitness with which 
he escaped from the ruins. Censure of his shiftiness is 
partly disarmed by the fact that there were so many in 
that troubled and uncertain time who would have acted 
like him if they had had the skill. Besides, he acted so 
steadily and with such sleepless vigilance and energy on 
the principle that the appearance of honesty is the best 
policy, that at this distance of time it is not easy to catch 
him tripping, and if we refuse to be guided by the opinion 
of his contemporaries, we almost inevitably fall victims to 
his incomparable plausibility. Deviations in his political 
writings from the course of the honest patriot are almost 
as difficult to detect as flaws in the verisimilitude of Rob- 
inson Crusoe or the Journal of the Plague. 

During the two months' interval between the substitu- 
tion of Dartmouth for Sunderland and the fall of Godol- 
phin, Defoe used all his powers of eloquence and argument 
to avert the threatened changes in the Ministry, and keep 
the Tories out. He had a personal motive for this, he 
confessed. " My own share in the ravages they shall make 
upon our liberties is like to be as severe as any man's, from 
the rage and fury of a party who are in themselves implaca- 
ble, and whom God has not been pleased to bless me with 
a 'talent to flatter and submit to." Of the dismissed minis- 
ter Sunderland, with whom Defoe had been in personal re- 
lations during the negotiations for the Union, he spoke in 
terms of the warmest praise, always with a formal profes- 
sion of not challenging the Queen's judgment in discharg- 
ing her servant. " My Lord Sunderland," he said, " leaves 
the Ministry with the most unblemished character that ever 
I read of any statesman in the world." " I am making no 



86 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

court to my Lord Sunderland. The unpolished author of 
this paper never had the talent of making his court to the 
great men of the age." But where is the objection against 
his conduct? Not a dog of the party can bark against him. 
" They cannot show me a man of their party that ever did 
act like him, or of whom they can say we should believe 
he would if he had the opportunity." The Tories were 
clamouring for the dismissal of all the other Whigs. High- 
Church addresses to the Queen were pouring in, claiming 
to represent the sense of the nation, and hinting an abso- 
lute want of confidence in the Administration. Defoe ex- 
amined the conduct of the ministers severally and collect- 
ively, and demanded where was the charge against them, 
where the complaint, where the treasure misapplied ? 

As for the sense of the nation, there was one sure way 
of testing this better than any got-up addresses, namely, 
the rise or fall of the public credit. The public stocks fell 
immediately on the news of Sunderland's dismissal, and 
were only partially revived upon Her Majesty's assurance 
to the Directors of the Bank that she meant to keep the 
Ministry otherwise unchanged. A rumour that Parliament 
was to be dissolved had sent them down again. If the 
public credit is thus affected by the mere apprehension of 
a turn of affairs in England, Defoe said, the thing itself 
will be a fatal blow to it. The coy Lady Credit had been 
wavering in her attachment to England ; any sudden change 
would fright her away altogether. As for the pooh-pooh 
cry of the Tories that the national credit was of no conse- 
quence, that a nation could not be in debt to itself, and 
that their moneyed men would come forward with nine- 
teen shillings in the pound for the support of the war, 
Defoe treated this claptrap with proper ridicule. 

But in spite of all Defoe's efforts, the crash came. On 



. 



VI.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 87 

the 10th of August the Queen sent to Godolphin for the 
Treasurer's staff, and Harley became her Prime Minister. 
How did Defoe behave then ? The first two numbers of 
the Review after the Lord Treasurer's fall are among the 
most masterly of his writings. He was not a small, mean, 
timid time-server and turncoat. He faced about with bold 
and steady caution, on the alert to give the lie to anybody 
who dared to accuse him of facing about at all. He frank- 
ly admitted that he was in a quandary what to say about 
the change that had taken place. "If a man could be 
found that could sail north and south, that could speak 
truth and falsehood, that could turn to the right hand and 
the left, all at the same time, he would be the man, he 
would be the only proper person that should now speak." 
Of one thing only he was certain. " We are sure honest 
men go out." As for their successors, "it is our business 
to hope, and time must answer for those that come in. If 
Tories, if Jacobites, if High-fliers, if madmen of any kind 
are to come in, I am against them ; I ask them no favour, 
I make no court to them, nor am I going about to please 
them." But the question was, what was to be done in the 
circumstances? Defoe stated plainly two courses, with 
their respective dangers. To cry out about the new Min- 
istry was to ruin public credit. To profess cheerfulness 
was to encourage the change and strengthen the hands of 
those that desired to push it farther. On the whole, for 
himself he considered the first danger the most to be dread- 
ed of the two. Therefore he announced his intention of 
devoting his whole energy to maintaining the public cred- 
it, and advised all true "Whigs to do likewise. " Though I 
don't like the crew, I won't sink the ship. I'll do my best 
to save the ship. I'll pump and heave and haul, and do 
anything I can, though he that pulls with me were my en- 



88 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

emy. The reason is plain. "We are all in the ship, and 
must sink or swim together." 

"What could be more plausible? What conduct more 
truly patriotic ? Indeed, it would be difficult to find fault 
with Defoe's behaviour, were it not for the rogue's protes- 
tations of inability to court the favour of great men, and his 
own subsequent confessions in his Aj^eal to Honour and 
Justice, as to what took place behind the scenes. Imme- 
diately on the turn of affairs he took steps to secure that 
connexion with the Government, the existence of which he 
was always denying. The day after Godolphin's displace- 
ment, he tells us, he w T aited on him, and " humbly asked 
his lordship's direction what course he should take." Go- 
dolphin at once assured him, in very much the same words 
that Harley had used before, that the change need make 
no difference to him ; he was the Queen's servant, and all 
that had been done for him was by Her Majesty's special 
and particular direction ; his business was to w r ait till he 
saw things settled, and then apply himself to the Ministers 
of State to receive Her Majesty's commands from them. 
Thereupon Defoe resolved to guide himself by the follow- 
ing principle : — 

" It occurred to me immediately, as a principle for my con- 
duct, that it was not material to me what ministers Her Maj- 
esty was pleased to employ ; my duty was to go along with 
every Ministry, so far as they did not break in upon the Con- 
stitution, and the laws and liberties of my country; my part 
being only the duty of a subject, viz., to submit to all lawful 
commands, and to enter into no service which was not justi- 
fiable by the laws ; to all which I have exactly obliged my- 
self." 

Defoe was thus, as he says, providentially cast back upon 
his original benefactor. That he received any considera- 



vi.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 89 

tion, pension, gratification, or reward for his services to 
Harley, " except that old appointment which Her Majesty 
was pleased to make him," he strenuously denied. The 
denial is possibly true, and it is extremely probable that he 
was within the truth when he protested in the most solemn 
manner that he had never " received any instructions, di- 
rections, orders, or let them call it what they will, of that 
kind, for the writing of any part of what he had written, 
or any materials for the putting together, for the forming 
any book or pamphlet whatsoever, from the said Earl of 
Oxford, late Lord Treasurer, or from any person by his 
order or direction, since the time that the late Earl of Go- 
dolphin was Lord Treasurer." Defoe declared that " in all 
his writing, he ever capitulated for his liberty to speak ac- 
cording to his own judgment of things," and we may easily 
believe him. He was much too clever a servant to need 
instructions. 

His secret services to Harley in the new elections are 
probably buried in oblivion. In the Review he pursued 
a strain which to the reader who does not take his articles 
in connexion with the politics of the time, might appear 
to be thoroughly consistent with his advice to the electors 
on previous occasions. He meant to confine himself, he 
said at starting, rather to the manner of choosing than to 
the persons to be chosen, and he never denounced bribery, 
intimidation, rioting, rabbling, and every form of interfer- 
ence with the electors' freedom of choice, in more ener- 
getic language. As regarded the persons to be chosen, 
his advice was as before, to choose moderate men — men of 
sense and temper, not men of fire and fury. But he no 
longer asserted, as he had done before, the exclusive pos- 
session of good qualities by the Whigs. He now recog- 
nised that there were hot Whigs as well as moderate 



90 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

"Whigs, moderate Tories as well as hot Tories. It was 
for the nation to avoid both extremes and rally round 
the men of moderation, whether Whig or Tory. " If we 
have a Tory High-flying Parliament, we Tories are un- 
done. If we have a hot Whig Parliament, we Whigs are 
undone." 

The terms of Defoe's advice were unexceptionable, but 
the Whigs perceived a change from the time when he de- 
clared that if ever we have a Tory Parliament the nation 
is undone. It was as if a Eepublican writer, after the 
coup d'etat of the 16th May, 1877, had warned the French 
against electing extreme Republicans, and had echoed the 
Marshal-President's advice to give their votes to moderate 
men of all parties. Defoe did not increase the conviction 
of his party loyalty when a Tory Parliament was returned, 
by trying to prove that whatever the new members might 
call themselves, they must inevitably be Whigs. He ad- 
mitted in the most unqualified way that the elections had 
been disgracefully riotous and disorderly, and lectured the 
constituencies freely on their conduct. " It is not," he 
said, "a Free Parliament that you have chosen. You have 
met, mobbed, rabbled, and thrown dirt at one another, but 
election by mob is no more free election than Oliver's elec- 
tion by a standing army. Parliaments and rabbles are 
contrary things." Yet he had hopes of the gentlemen 
who had been thus chosen. 

" I have it upon many good grounds, as I think I told you, 
that there are some people who are shortly to come together, 
of whose character, let the people that send them up think 
what they will, when they come thither they will not run the 
mad length that is expected of them ; they will act upon the 
Revolution principle, keep within the circle of the law, pro- 
ceed with temper, moderation, and justice, to support the 



vi.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 91 

same interest we have all carried on — and this I call being 
Whiggish, or acting as Whigs. 

" I shall not trouble you with further examining why they 
will be so, or why they will act thus ; I think it is so plain 
from the necessity of the Constitution and the circumstances 
of things before them, that it needs no further demonstration 
— they will be Whigs, they must be Whigs ; there is no rem- 
edy, for the Constitution is a Whig." 

The new members of Parliament must either be Whigs or 
traitors, for everybody who favours the Protestant succes- 
sion is a AYhig, and everybody who does not is a traitor. 
Defoe used the same ingenuity in playing upon words in 
his arguments in support of the public credit. Every true 
Whig, he argued, in the Review and in separate essays, was 
bound to uphold the public credit, for to permit it to be 
impaired was the surest way to let in the Pretender. The 
Whigs were accused of withdrawing their money from the 
public stocks, to mark their distrust of the Government. 
" Nonsense !" Defoe said, " in that case they would not be 
Whigs." Naturally enough, as the Review now practically 
supported a Ministry in which extreme Tories had the pre- 
dominance, he was upbraided for having gone over to that 
party. " "Why, gentlemen," he retorted, " it would be more 
natural for you to think I am turned Turk than High-flier ; 
and to make me a Mahometan would hot be half so ridicu- 
lous as to make me say the W T higs are running down cred- 
it, when, on the contrary, I am still satisfied if there were 
no W r higs at this time, there would hardly be any such 
thing as credit left among us." " If the credit of the na- 
tion is to be maintained, we must all act as Whigs, because 
credit can be maintained upon no other foot. Had the 
doctrine of non-resistance of tyranny been voted, had the 
Prerogative been exalted above the Law, and property sub- 



92 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

jected to absolute will, would Parliament have voted the 
funds ? Credit supposes Whigs lending and a Whig Gov- 
ernment borrowing. It is nonsense to talk of credit and 
passive submission." 

Had Defoe confined himself to lecturing those hot 
Whigs who were so afraid of the secret Jacobitism of 
Harley's colleagues that they were tempted to withdraw 
their money from the public stocks, posterity, unable to 
judge how far these fears were justified, and how far it 
was due to a happy accident that they were not realized, 
might have given him credit for sacrificing partisanship to 
patriotism. This plea could hardly be used for another 
matter in which, with every show of reasonable fairness, 
he gave a virtual support to the Ministry. We have seen 
how he spoke of Marlborough, and Godolphin's manage- 
ment of the army and the finances when the Whigs were 
in office. When the Tories came in, they at once set 
about redeeming their pledges to inquire into the malver- 
sation of their predecessors. Concerning this proceed- 
ing, Defoe spoke with an approval which, though neces- 
sarily guarded in view of his former professions of ex- 
treme satisfaction, was none the less calculated to recom- 
mend. 

"Inquiry into miscarriages in things so famous and so 
fatal as war and battle is a thing so popular that no man 
can argue against it ; and had we paid well, and hanged 
well, much sooner, as some men had not been less in a con- 
dition to mistake, so some others might not have been here 
to find fault. But it is better late than never ; when the in- 
quiry is set about heartily, it may be useful on several ac- 
counts, both to unravel past errors and to prevent new. For 
my part, as we have for many years past groaned for want 
of justice upon wilful mistakes, yet, in hopes some of the care- 



vi.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 93 

ful and mischievous designing gentlemen may come in for a 
share, I am glad the work is begun. 1 ' 

With equal good humour and skill in leaving open a 
double interpretation, he commented on the fact that the 
new Parliament did not, as had been customary, give a 
formal vote of thanks to Marlborough for his conduct of 
his last campaign. 

" We have had a mighty pother here in print about re- 
warding of generals. Some think great men too much re- 
warded, and some think them too little rewarded. The case 
is so nice, neither side will bear me to speak my mind ; but 
I am persuaded of this, that there is no general has or ever 
will merit great things of us, but he has received and will 
receive all the grateful acknowledgments he ought to ex- 
pect." 

But his readers would complain that he had not denned 
the word " ought." That, he said, with audacious pleas- 
antry, he left to them. And while they were on the sub- 
ject of mismanagement, he would give them a word of 
advice which he had often given them before. " While 
you bite and devour one another, you are all mismanagers. 
Put an end to your factions, your tumults, your rabbles, 
or you will not be able to make war upon 'anybody." 
Previously, however, his way of making peace at home 
was to denounce the High-fliers. He was still pursuing 
the same object, though by a different course, now that 
the leaders of the High-fliers were in office, when he de- 
clared that " those Whigs who say that the new Ministry 
is entirely composed of Tories and High-fliers are fool- 
Whigs." The remark was no doubt perfectly true, but 
yet if Defoe had been thoroughly consistent he ought at 



94 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

least, instead of supporting the Ministry on account of the 
small moderate element it contained, to have urged its 
purification from dangerous ingredients. 

This, however, it must be admitted, he also did, though 
indirectly and at a somewhat later stage, when Harley's 
tenure of the Premiership was menaced by High-fliers who 
thought him much too lukewarm a leader. A " cave," the 
famous October Club, was formed in the autumn of 1711, 
to urge more extreme measures upon the ministry against 
Whig officials, and to organize a High-Church agitation 
throughout the country. It consisted chiefly of country 
squires, who wdshed to see members of the late Ministry 
impeached, and the Duke of Marlborough dismissed from 
the command of the army. At Harley's instigation Swift 
wrote an " advice " to these hot partisans, beseeching them 
to have patience and trust the Ministry, and everything 
that they wished would happen in due time. Defoe 
sought to break their ranks by a direct onslaught in his 
most vigorous style, denouncing them in the Review as 
Jacobites in disguise and an illicit importation from France, 
and writing their " secret history," " with some friendly 
characters of the illustrious members of that honourable 
society " in two separate tracts. This skirmish served the 
double purpose of strengthening Harley against the reck- 
less zealots of his party, and keeping up Defoe's appear- 
ance of impartiality. Throughout the fierce struggle of 
parties, never so intense in any period of our history as 
during those years when the Constitution itself hung in 
the balance, it was as a True-born Englishman first and a 
Whig and Dissenter afterwards, that Defoe gave his sup- 
port to the Tory Ministry. It may not have been his 
fault ; he may have been most unjustly suspected ; but 
nobody at the time would believe his protestations of in- 



vi.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 95 

dependence. When his former High -flying persecutor, 
the Earl of Nottingham, went over to the AVhigs, and with 
their acquiescence, or at least without their active opposi- 
tion, introduced another Bill to put down Occasional Con- 
formity, Defoe wrote trenchantly against it. But even 
then the Dissenters, as he loudly lamented, repudiated his 
alliance. The Whigs were not so much pleased on this 
occasion with his denunciations of the persecuting spirit 
of the High -Churchmen, as they were enraged by his 
stinging taunts levelled at themselves for abandoning the 
Dissenters to their persecutors. The Dissenters must now 
see, Defoe said, that they would not be any better off un- 
der a Low-Church ministry than under a High-Church 
ministry. But the Dissenters, considering that the Wliigs 
were too much in a minority to prevent the passing of the 
Bill, however willing to do so, would only see in their pro- 
fessed champion an artful supporter of the men in power. 
A curious instance has been preserved of the estimate 
of Defoe's character at this time. 1 M. Mesnager, an agent 
sent by the French King to sound the Ministry and the 
country as to terms of peace, wanted an able pamphleteer 
to promote the French interest. The Swedish Eesident 
recommended Defoe, who had just issued a tract, entitled 
Reasons why this Nation ought to put an end to this ex- 
pensive War. Mesnager was delighted with the tract, at 
once had it translated into French and circulated through 
the Netherlands, employed the Swede to treat with Defoe, 
and sent him a hundred pistoles by way of earnest. De- 
foe kept the pistoles, but told the Queen, M. Mesnager re- 
cording that though " he missed his aim in this person, 

1 I doubt whether it adds to the credibility of the story in all 
points that the minutes of M. Mesnager' s Negotiations were " trans- 
lated," and probably composed by Defoe himself. See p. 136. 



96 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

the money perhaps was not wholly lost ; for I afterwards 
understood that the man was in the service of the state, 
and that he had let the Queen know of the hundred pis- 
toles he had received ; so I was obliged to sit still, and be 
very well satisfied that I had not discovered myself to 
him, for it was not our season yet." The anecdote at once 
shows the general opinion entertained of Defoe, and the 
fact that he was less corruptible than was supposed. 
There can be little doubt that our astute intriguer would 
have outwitted the French emissary if he had not been 
warned in time, pocketed his bribes, and wormed his se- 
crets out of him for the information of the Government. 

During Godolphin's Ministry, Defoe's cue had been to 
reason with the nation against too impatient a longing for 
peace. Let us have peace by all means, had been his text, 
but not till honourable terms have been secured, and mean- 
time the war is going on as prosperously as any but mad- 
men can desire. He repeatedly challenged adversaries 
who compared what he wrote then with what he wrote 
under the new Ministry, to prove him guilty of inconsist- 
ency. He stood on safe ground when he made this chal- 
lenge, for circumstances had changed sufficiently to justify 
any change of opinion. The plans of the Confederates 
were disarranged by the death of the Emperor, and the 
accession of his brother, the Archduke Charles, to the va- 
cant crown. To give the crown of Spain in these new 
circumstances to the Archduke, as had been the object of 
the Allies when they began the war, would have been as 
dangerous to the balance of power as to let Spain pass to 
Louis's grandson, Philip of Anjou. It would be more 
dangerous, Defoe argued ; and by far the safest course 
would be to give Spain to Philip and his posterity, who 
" would be as much Spaniards in a very short time, as 



n.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 97 

ever Philip II. was or any of his other predecessors." 
This was the main argument which had been used in the 
latter days of King William against going to war at all, 
and Defoe had then refuted it scornfully; but circum- 
stances had changed, and he not only adopted it, but also 
issued an essay " proving that it was always the sense both 
of King "William and of all the Confederates, and even 
of the Grand Alliance itself, that the Spanish monarchy 
should never be united in the person of the Emperor." 
Partition the Spanish dominions in Europe between 
France and Germany, and the West Indies between Eng- 
land and Holland — such was Defoe's idea of a proper 
basis of peace. 

But while Defoe expounded in various forms the condi- 
tions of a good peace, he devoted his main energy to prov- 
ing that peace under some conditions was a necessity. He 
dilated on the enormous expense of the war, and showed 
by convincing examples that it was ruining the trade of 
the country. Much that he said was perfectly true, but if 
he had taken M. Mesnager's bribes and loyally carried out 
his instructions, he could not more effectually have served 
the French King's interests than by writing as he did at 
that juncture. The proclaimed necessity under which 
England lay to make peace, offered Louis an advantage 
which he was not slow to take. The proposals which he 
made at the Congress of Utrecht, and which he had ascer- 
tained would be accepted by the English Ministry and the 
Queen, were not unjustly characterised by the indignant 
Whigs as being such as he might have made at the close 
of a successful war. The territorial concessions to Eng- 
land and Holland were insignificant; the States were to 
have the right of garrisoning certain barrier towns in 
Flanders, and England was to have some portions of Cana- 

5* 



98 



DANIEL DEFOE. 



[chap. 



da. But there was no mention of dividing the West In- 
dies between them — the West Indies were to remain at- 
tached to Spain. It was the restoration of their trade 
that was their main desire in these great commercial coun- 
tries, and even that object Louis agreed to promote in a 
manner that seemed, according to the ideas of the time, to 
be more to his own advantage than to theirs. In the case 
of England, he was to remove prohibitions against our im- 
ports, and in return we engaged to give the French im- 
ports the privileges of the most favoured nations. In 
short, we were to have free trade with France, which the 
commercial classes of the time looked upon as a very 
doubtful blessing. 

It is because Defoe wrote in favour of this free trade 
that he is supposed to have been superior to the commer- 
cial fallacies of the time. But a glance at his arguments 
shows that this is a very hasty inference. It was no part 
of Defoe's art as a controversialist to seek to correct pop- 
ular prejudices ; on the contrary, it was his habit to take 
them for granted as the bases of his arguments, to work 
from them as premisses towards his conclusion. He ex- 
pressly avowed himself a prohibitionist in principle i — 

" I am far from being of their mind who say that all pro- 
hibitions are destructive to trade, and that wise nations, the 
Dutch, make no prohibitions at all. 

" Where any nation has, by the singular blessing of God, 
a produce given to their country from which such a manu- 
facture can be made as other nations cannot be without, and 
none can make that produce but themselves, it would be dis- 
traction in that nation not to prohibit the exportation of 
that original produce till it is manufactured." 

He had been taunted with flying in the face of what 
he had himself said in King William's time in favour of 



n] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 99 

prohibition. But lie boldly undertakes to prove that pro- 
hibition was absolutely necessary in King William's time, 
and not only so, but that " the advantages we may make 
of taking off a prohibition now are all founded upon the 
advantages we did make of laying on a prohibition then : 
that the same reason which made a prohibition then the 
best thing, makes it now the maddest thing a nation could 
do or ever did in the matter of trade." In King- "Wil- 
liam's time, the balance of trade was against us to the ex- 
tent of 850,000/., in consequence of the French King's 
laying extravagant duties upon the import of all our wool- 
len manufactures. 

"Whoever thinks that by opening the French trade I 
should mean . . . that we should come to trade with them 
850,000Z. per annum to our loss, must think me as mad as I 
think him for suggesting it ; but if, on the contrary, I prove 
that as we traded then 850,000?. a year to our loss, we can 
trade now with them 600,000?. to our gain, then I will vent- 
ure to draw this consequence, that we are distracted, speak- 
ing of our trading wits, if we do not trade with them." 

In a preface to the Eighth Volume of the Review (July 
29, 1712), Defoe announced his intention of discontinuing 
the publication, in consequence of the tax then imposed on 
newspapers. We can hardly suppose that this was his real 
motive, and as a matter of fact the Revieiv, whose death 
had been announced, reappeared in due course in the form 
of a single leaf, and was published in that form till the 
11th of June, 1 7 1 3 . By that time a new project was on 
foot which Defoe had frequently declared his intention of 
starting, a paper devoted exclusively to the discussion of 
the affairs of trade. The Review at one time had declared 
its main subject to be trade, but had claimed a liberty of 



100 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

digression under which the main subject had all but dis- 
appeared. At last, however, in May, 17 13, when popular 
excitement and hot Parliamentary debates were expected 
on the Commercial Treaty with France, an exclusively 
trading paper was established, entitled Mercator. Defoe 
denied being the author — that is, conductor or editor of 
this paper — and said that he had not power to put what he 
would into it ; which may have been literally true. Every 
number, however, bears traces of his hand or guidance; 
Mercator is identical in opinions, style, and spirit with the 
Review, differing only in the greater openness of its attacks 
upon the opposition of the AYhigs to the Treaty of Com- 
merce. Party spirit was so violent that summer, after the 
publication of the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, that 
Defoe was probably glad to shelter himself under the re- 
sponsibility of another name ; he had flaunted the cloak of 
impartial advice till it had become a thing of shreds and 
patches. 

To prove that the balance of trade, in spite of a prevail- 
ing impression to the contrary, not only might be, but had 
been, on the side of England, was the chief purpose of 
Mercator. The Whig Flying Post chaffed Mercator for 
trying to reconcile impossibilities, but Mercator held 
stoutly on with an elaborate apparatus of comparative 
tables of exports and imports, and ingenious schemes for 
the development of various branches of the trade with 
France. Defoe was too fond of carrying the war into the 
enemy's country, to attack prohibitions or the received 
doctrine as to the balance of trade in principle ; he fought 
the enemy spiritedly on their own ground. "Take a 
medium of three years for above forty years past, and cal- 
culate the exports and imports to and from France, and it 
shall appear the balance of trade was always on the English 



vi.] THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT. 101 

side, to the loss and disadvantage of the French." It 
followed, upon the received commercial doctrines, that the 
French King was making a great concession in consenting 
to take off high duties upon English goods. This was 
precisely what Defoe was labouring to prove. " The 
French King in taking off the said high duties ruins all 
his own manufactures." The common belief was that the 
terms of peace would ruin English manufacturing indus- 
try ; full in the teeth of this, Defoe, as was his daring 
custom, flung the paradox of the extreme opposite. On 
this occasion he acted purely as a party writer. That he 
was never a free-trader, at least in principle, will appear 
from the following extract from his Plan of the English 
Commerce, published in 1728 : — 

" Seeing trade then is the fund of w T ealth and power, we 
cannot wonder that we see the wisest Princes and States 
anxious and concerned for the increase of the commerce and 
trade of their subjects, and of the growth of the country ; 
anxious to propagate the sale of such goods as are the manu- 
facture of their own subjects, and that employs their own 
people ; especially of such as keep the money of their domin- 
ions at home ; and on the contrary, for prohibiting the im- 
portation from abroad of such things as are the product of 
other countries, and of the labour of other people, or which 
carry money back in return, and not merchandise in exchange. 

u Nor can we wonder that we see such Princes and States 
endeavouring to set up such manufactures in their own coun- 
tries, which they see successfully and profitably carried on 
by their neighbours, and to endeavour to procure the mate- 
rials proper for setting up those manufactures by all just and 
possible methods from other countries. 

" Hence we cannot blame the French or Germans for en- 
deavouring to get over the British wool into their hands, by 
the help of which they may bring their people to imitate our 



102 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. vi. 

manufactures, which are so esteemed in the world, as well 
as so gainful at home. 

" Nor can we blame any foreign nation for prohibiting the 
use and wearing of our manufactures, if they can either make 
them at home, or make any which they can shift w T ith in their 
stead. 

" The reason is plain. 'Tis the interest of every nation to 
encourage their own trade, to encourage those manufactures 
that will employ their own subjects, consume their own 
growth of provisions, as w r ell as materials of commerce, and 
such as will keep their money or species at home. 

'"Tis from this just principle that the French prohibit the 
English woollen manufacture, and the English again prohibit, 
or impose a tax equal to a prohibition, on the French silks, 
paper, linen, and several other of their manufactures. 'Tis 
from the same just reason in trade that w T e prohibit the wear- 
ing of East India wrought silks, printed calicoes, &c. ; that 
we prohibit the importation of French brandy, Brazil sugars, 
and Spanish tobacco ; and so of several other things." 



CHAPTER VII. 

DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES. 

Defoe's unwearied zeal in the service of Harley had ex- 
cited the bitterest resentment among his old allies, the 
Whigs. He often complained of it, more in sorrow than 
in anger. He had no right to look for any other treat- 
ment ; it was a just punishment upon him for seeking the 
good of his country without respect of parties. An au- 
thor that wrote from principle had a very hard task in 
those dangerous times. If he ventured on the dangerous 
precipice of telling unbiassed truth, he must expect mar- 
tyrdom from both sides. This resignation of the simple 
single-minded patriot to the pains and penalties of hon- 
esty, naturally added to the rage of the party with whose 
factious proceedings he would have nothing to do ; and 
yet it has always been thought an extraordinary instance 
of party spite that the Whigs should have instituted a 
prosecution against him, on the alleged ground that a cer- 
tain remarkable series of Tracts were written in favour of 
the Pretender. Towards the end of 1712 Defoe had is- 
sued A Seasonable Warning and Caution against the In- 
sinuations of Papists and Jacobites in favour of the Pre- 
tender. No charge of Jacobitism could be made against a 
pamphlet containing such a sentence as this ; — 



104 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

" Think, then, dear Britons ! what a King this Pretender 
must be ! a papist by inclination ; a tyrant by education ; a 
Frenchman by honour and obligation; — and how long will 
your liberties last you in this condition ? And when your 
liberties are gone, how long will your religion remain? 
When your hands are tied ; when armies bind you ; when 
power oppresses you ; when a tyrant disarms you ; when a 
Popish French tyrant reigns over you ; by what means or 
methods can you pretend to maintain your Protestant re- 
ligion ?" 

A second pamphlet, Hannibal at the Gates, strongly 
urging party union and the banishment of factious spirit, 
was equally unmistakable in tone. The titles of the fol- 
lowing three of the series were more startling: — Reasons 
against the Succession of the House of Hanover — And 
what if the Pretender should come? or Some considera- 
tions of the advantages and real consequences of the Pre- 
tender's possessing the Crown of Great Britain — An An- 
swer to a Question that nobody thinks of viz. Put what if 
the Queen should die? The contents, however, were plain- 
ly ironical. The main reason against the Succession of 
the Prince of Hanover was that it might be wise for the 
nation to take a short turn of a French, Popish, heredita- 
ry-right regime in the first place as an emetic. Emetics 
were good for the health of individuals, and there could 
be no better preparative for a healthy constitutional gov- 
ernment than another experience of arbitrary power. De- 
foe had used the same ironical argument for putting To- 
ries in office in 1708. The advantages of the Pretender's 
possessing the Crown were that we should be saved from 
all further danger of a war with France, and should no 
longer hold the exposed position of a Protestant State 
among the great Catholic Powers of Europe. The point 



vil] DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES. 105 

of the last pamphlet of the series was less distinct ; it sug- 
gested the possibility of the English people losing their 
properties, their estates, inheritance, lands, goods, lives, and 
liberties, unless they were clear in their own minds what 
course to take in the event of the Queen's death. But 
none of the three Tracts contain anything that could pos- 
sibly be interpreted as a serious argument in favour of the 
Pretender. They were all calculated to support the Suc- 
cession of the Elector of Hanover. Why, then, should 
the Whigs have prosecuted the author? It was a strange 
thing, as Defoe did not fail to complain, that they should 
try to punish a man for writing in their own interest. 

The truth, however, is that although Defoe afterwards 
tried to convince the Whig leaders that he had written 
these pamphlets in their interest, they were written in the 
interest of Harley. They were calculated to recommend 
that Minister to Prince George, in the event of his acces- 
sion to the English throne. We see this at once when 
we examine their contents by the light of the personal in- 
trigues of the time. Harley was playing a double game. 
It was doubtful who the Queen's successor would be, and 
he aimed at making himself safe in either of the two pos- 
sible contingencies. Very soon after his accession to pow- 
er in 1 710, he made vague overtures for the restoration of 
the Stuarts under guarantees for civil and religious liberty. 
When pressed to take definite steps in pursuance of this 
plan, he deprecated haste, and put off and put off, till the 
Pretender's adherents lost patience. All the time he was 
making protestations of fidelity to the Court of Hanover. 
The increasing vagueness of his promises to the Jacobites 
seems to show that, as time went on, he became convinced 
that the Hanoverian was the winning cause. No man 
could better advise him as to the feeling of the English 



106 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

people than Defoe, who was constantly perambulating the 
country on secret services, in all probability for the direct 
purpose of sounding the general opinion. It was towards 
the end of 1712, by which time Harley's shilly-shallying 
had effectually disgusted the Jacobites, that the first of 
Defoe's series of An ti- Jacobite tracts appeared. It pro- 
fessed to be written by An Englishman at the Court of 
Hanover, which affords some ground, though it must be 
confessed slight, for supposing that Defoe had visited Han- 
over, presumably as the bearer of some of Harley's assur- 
ances of loyalty. The Seasonable Warning and Caution 
was circulated, Defoe himself tells us, in thousands among 
the poor people by several of his friends. Here was a 
fact to which Harley could appeal as a circumstantial 
proof of his zeal in the Hanoverian cause. Whether De- 
foe's Anti-Jacobite tracts really served his benefactor in 
this way, can only be matter of conjecture. However that 
may be, they were upon the surface written in Harley's 
interest. The warning and caution was expressly directed 
against the insinuations that the Ministry were in favour 
of the Pretender. All who made these insinuations were 
assumed by the writer to be Papists, Jacobites, and ene- 
mies of Britain. As these insinuations were the chief 
war-cry of the Whigs, and we now know that they were 
not without foundation, it is easy to understand why De- 
foe's pamphlets, though Anti-Jacobite, were resented by 
the party in whose interest he had formerly written. He 
excused himself afterwards by saying that he was not 
aware of the Jacobite leanings of the Ministry ; that none 
of them ever said one word in favour of the Pretender to 
him ; that he saw no reason to believe that they did favour 
the Pretender. As for himself, he said, they certainly nev,- 
er employed him in any Jacobite intrigue. He defied his 



til] DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES. 107 

enemies to " prove that he ever kept company or had any 
society, friendship, or conversation with any Jacobite. So 
averse had he been to the interest and the people, that he 
had studiously avoided their company on all occasions." 
Within a few months of his making these protestations, De- 
foe was editing a Jacobite newspaper under secret instruc- 
tions from a Whig Government. But this is anticipating. 
That an influential Whig should have set on foot a 
prosecution of Defoe as the author of " treasonable libels 
against the House of Hanover," although the charge had 
no foundation in the language of the incriminated pam- 
phlets, is intelligible enough. The Whig party writers 
were delighted with the prosecution, one of them triumph- 
ing over Defoe as being caught at last, and put " in Lob's 
pound," and speaking of him as " the vilest of all the 
•writers that have prostituted their pens either to encour- 
age faction, oblige a party, or serve their own mercenary 
ends." But that the Court of Queen's Bench, before 
whom Defoe was brought — with some difficulty, it would 
appear, for he had fortified his house at Newington like 
Eobinson Crusoe's castle — should have unanimously de- 
clared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that one of 
them, on his pleading that they were ironical, should have 
told him it was a kind of irony for which he might come 
to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, is not so easy to un- 
derstand, unless we suppose that, in these tempestuous 
times, judges like other men were powerfully swayed by 
party feeling. It is possible, however, that they deemed 
the mere titles of the pamphlets offences in themselves, 
disturbing cries raised while the people were not yet clear 
of the forest of anarchy, and still subject to dangerous 
panics — offences of the same nature as if a man should 
shout fire in sport in a crowded theatre. Possibly, also, 



108 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

the severity of the Court was increased by Defoe's indis- 
cretion in commenting upon the case in the Review, while 
it was still sub judice. At any rate he escaped punish- 
ment. The Attorney - General was ordered to prosecute 
him, but before the trial came off Defoe obtained a pardon 
under the royal seal. 

The Whigs were thus baulked of revenge upon their 
renegade. Their loyal writers attributed Defoe's pardon 
to the secret Jacobitism of the Ministry — quite wrongly — 
as we have just seen he was acting for Harley as a Han- 
overian and not as a Jacobite. Curiously enough, when 
Defoe next came before the Queen's Bench, the instigator 
of the prosecution was a Tory, and the Government was 
Whig, and he again escaped from the clutches of the law 
by the favour of the Government. Till Mr. William Lee's 
remarkable discovery, fourteen years ago, of certain letters 
in Defoe's handwriting in the State Paper Office, it was 
generally believed that on the death of Queen Anne, the 
fall of the Tory Administration, and the complete discom- 
fiture of Harley's trimming policy, the veteran pamphleteer 
and journalist, now fifty-three years of age, withdrew from 
political warfare, and spent the evening of his life in the 
composition of those works of fiction which have made 
his name immortal. His biographers had misjudged his 
character and underrated his energy. When Harley fell 
from power, Defoe sought service under the Whigs. He 
had some difficulty in regaining their favour, and when he 
did obtain employment from them, it was of a kind little 
to his honour. 

In his Appeal to Honour and Justice, published early 
in 1715, in which he defended himself against the charges 
copiously and virulently urged of being a party-writer, a 
hireling, and a turncoat, and explained everything that was 



til] DIFFICULTIES IX RE-CHAXGIXG- SIDES. 109 

doubtful in his conduct by alleging the obligations of grat- 
itude to his first benefactor Harley, Defoe declared that 
since the Queen's death he had taken refuge in absolute 
silence. He found, he said, that if he offered to say a 
word in favour of the Hanoverian settlement, it was called 
fawning and turning round again, and therefore he re- 
solved to meddle neither one way nor the other. He com- 
plained sorrowfully that in spite of this resolution, and 
though he had not written one book since the Queen's 
death, a great many things were called by his name. In 
that case, he had no resource but to practise a Christian 
spirit and pray for the forgiveness of his enemies. This 
was Defoe's own account, and it was accepted as the whole 
truth, till Mr. Lee's careful research and good fortune gave 
a different colour to his personal history from the time of 
Harley 's displacement. 1 

During the dissensions, in the last days of the Queen 
which broke up the Tory Ministry, Mercator was dropped. 
Defoe seems immediately to have entered into communi- 
cation with the printer of the Whig Flying Post, one 
William Hurt. The owner of the Post was abroad at the 
time, but his managers, whether actuated by personal spite 
or reasonable suspicion, learning that Hurt was in com- 
munication with one whom they looked upon as their en- 
emy, decided at once to change their printer. There being- 
no copyright in newspaper titles in those days, Hurt retal- 
iated by engaging Defoe to write another paper under the 
same title, advertising that, from the arrangements he had 

1 In making mention of Mr. Lee's valuable researches and discov- 
eries, I ought to add that his manner of connecting the facts for 
which I am indebted to him, and the construction he puts upon them, 
is entirely different from mine. For the view here implied of Defoe's 
character and motives, Mr. Lee' is in no way responsible. 



110 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

made, readers would find the new Flying Post better than 
the old. It was in his labours on this sham Flying Post, 
as the original indignantly called it in an appeal to Hurt's 
sense of honour and justice against the piracy, that Defoe 
came into collision with the law. His new organ was 
warmly loyal. On the 14th of August it contained a 
highly-coloured panegyric of George I., which alone would 
refute Defoe's assertion that he knew nothing of the arts 
of the courtier. His Majesty was described as a combina- 
tion of more graces, virtues, and capacities than the world 
had ever seen united in one individual, a man " born for 
council and fitted to command the world." Another num- 
ber of the Flying Post, a few days afterwards, contained 
an attack on one of the few Tories among the Lords of 
the Regency, nominated for the management of affairs till 
the King's arrival. During Bolingbroke's brief term of 
ascendency, he had despatched the Earl of Anglesey on a 
mission to Ireland. The Earl had hardly landed at Dublin 
when news followed him of the Queen's death, and he re- 
turned to act as one of the Lords Regent. In the Flying 
Post Defoe asserted that the object of his journey to Ire- 
land w T as " to new model the Forces there, and particularly 
to break no less than seventy of the honest officers of the 
army, and to fill up their places with the tools and creat- 
ures of Con. Phipps, and such a rabble of cut-throats as 
were fit for the work that they had for them to do." That 
there was some truth in the allegation is likely enough ; 
Sir Constantine Phipps was, at least, shortly afterwards 
dismissed from his offices. But Lord Anglesey at once 
took action against it as a scandalous libel. Defoe was 
brought before the Lords Justices, and committed for 
trial. 

He was liberated, however, on bail, and in spite of what 



vil] DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES. Ill 

he says about his resolution not to meddle on either side, 
made an energetic use of his liberty. He wrote The 
Secret History of One Year — the year after William's ac- 
cession — vindicating the King's clemency towards the 
abettors of the arbitrary government of James, and ex- 
plaining that he was compelled to employ many of them 
by the rapacious scrambling of his own adherents for 
places and pensions. The indirect bearing of this tract is 
obvious. In October three pamphlets came from Defoe's 
fertile pen ; an Advice to the People of England to lay 
aside feuds and faction, and live together under the new 
King like good Christians ; and two parts, in quick suc- 
cession, of a Secret History of the White Staff. This last 
work was an account of the circumstances under which 
the Treasurer's White Staff was taken from the Earl of 
Oxford, and put his conduct in a favourable light, exoner- 
ating him from the suspicion of Jacobitism, and affirming 
— not quite accurately, as other accounts of the transaction 
seem to imply — that it was by Harley's advice that the 
Staff was committed to the Earl of Shrewsbury. One 
would be glad to accept this as proof of Defoe's attach- 
ment to the cause of his disgraced benefactor ; yet Harley, 
as he lay in the Tower awaiting his trial on an impeach- 
ment of high treason, issued a disclaimer concerning the 
Secret History and another pamphlet, entitled An Ac- 
count of the Conduct of Robert, Earl of Oxford. These 
pamphlets, he said, were not written with his knowledge, 
or by his direction or encouragement ; " on the contrary, 
he had reason to believe from several passages therein con- 
tained that it was the intention of the author, or authors, 
to do him a prejudice." This disclaimer may have been 
dictated by a wish not to appear wanting in respect to his 
judges; at any rate, Defoe's Secret History bears no trace 



112 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

on the surface of a design to prejudice him by its recital 
of facts. An Appeal to Honour and Justice was Defoe's 
next production. While writing it, he was seized with a 
violent apoplectic fit, and it was issued with a Conclusion 
by the Publisher, mentioning this circumstance, explaining 
that the pamphlet was consequently incomplete, and add- 
ing : "If he recovers, he may be able to finish what he be- 
gan ; if not, it is the opinion of most that know him that 
the treatment which he here complains of, and some oth- 
ers that he would have spoken of, have been the apparent 
cause of his disaster." There is no sign of incomplete- 
ness in the Appeal ; and the Conclusion by the Publisher, 
while the author lay "in a weak and languishing condi- 
tion, neither able to go on nor likely to recover, at least in 
any short time," gives a most artistic finishing stroke to 
it. Defoe never interfered with the perfection of it after 
his recovery, which took place very shortly. The Appeal 
was issued in the first week of January ; before the end of 
the month the indomitable writer was ready with a Third 
Part of the Secret History, and a reply to Atterbury's Ad- 
vice to the Freeholders of England in view of the approach- 
ing elections. A series of tracts written in the character 
of a Quaker quickly followed, one rebuking a Dissenting 
preacher for inciting the new Government to vindictive 
severities, another rebuking Sacheverell for hypocrisy and 
perjury in taking the oath of abjuration, a third rebuking 
the Duke of Ormond for encouraging Jacobite and High- 
Church mobs. In March, Defoe published his Family In- 
structor, a book of 450 pages ; in July, his History, by a 
Scots Gentleman in the Swedish Service, of the Wars of 
Charles XII. 

Formidable as the list of these works seems, it does not 
represent more than Defoe's average rate of production 



vil] DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES. 113 

for thirty years of his life. With grave anxieties added 
to the strain of such incessant toil, it is no wonder that 
nature should have raised its protest in an apoplectic fit. 
Even nature must have owned herself vanquished, w T hen 
she saw this very protest pressed into the service of the 
irresistible and triumphant worker. All the time he was 
at large upon bail, awaiting his trial. The trial took place 
in July, 1715, and he was found guilty. But sentence was 
deferred till next term. October came round, but Defoe 
did not appear to receive his sentence. He had made his 
peace with the Government, upon " capitulations" of which 
chance has preserved the record in his own handwriting. 
He represented privately to Lord Chief Justice Parker 
that he had always been devoted to the Whig interest, 
and that any seeming departure from it had been due to 
errors of judgment, not to want of attachment. Whether 
the Whig leaders believed this representation we do not 
know, but they agreed to pardon " all former mistakes " if 
he would now enter faithfully into their service. Though 
the Hanoverian succession had been cordially welcomed by 
the steady masses of the nation, the Mar Rebellion in Scot- 
land and the sympathy shown with this movement in the 
south warned them that their enemies were not to be de- 
spised. There was a large turbulent element in the popu- 
lation, upon which agitators might work with fatal effect. 
The Jacobites had still a hold upon the Press, and the past 
years had been fruitful of examples of the danger of try- 
ing to crush sedition with the arm of the law. Prosecu- 
tion had been proved to be the surest road to popularity. 
It occurred therefore that Defoe might be useful if he 
still passed as an opponent of the Government, insinuating 
himself as such into the confidence of Jacobites, obtained 
control of their publications, and nipped mischief in the 



114 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap, til 

bud. It was a dangerous and delicate service, exposing 
the emissary to dire revenge if lie were detected, and to 
suspicion and misconstruction from his employers in his 
efforts to escape detection. But Defoe, delighting in his 
superior wits, and happy in the midst of dangerous in- 
trigues, boldly undertook the task. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 

For the discovery of this " strange and surprising " chap- 
ter in Defoe's life, which clears up much that might oth- 
erwise have been disputable in his character, the world is 
indebted solely to Mr. William Lee. Accident put Mr. 
Lee on the right scent, from which previous biographers 
had been diverted by too literal and implicit a faith in 
the arch-deceiver's statements, and too comprehensive an 
application of his complaint that his name was made the 
hackney title of the times, upon which all sorts of low 
scribblers fathered their vile productions. Defoe's secret 
services on Tory papers exposed him, as we have seen, to 
misconstruction. Nobody knew this better than himself, 
and nobody could have guarded against it with more 
sleepless care. In the fourth year of King George's reign 
a change took place in the Ministry. Lord Townshend 
was succeeded in the Home Secretary's office by Lord 
Stanhope. Thereupon Defoe judged it expedient to write 
to a private secretary, Mr. de la Faye, explaining at length 
his position. This letter along with five others, also de- 
signed to prevent misconstruction by his employers, lay in 
the State Paper Office till the year 1864, when the whole 
packet fell into the hands of Mr. Lee. The following suc- 
cinct fragment of autobiography is dated April 26, 1 71 8. 



116 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

" Though I doubt not but you have acquainted my Lord 
Stanhope with what humble sense of his lordship's goodness 
I received the account you were pleased to give me, that my 
little services are accepted, and that his lordship is satisfied 
to go upon the foot of former capitulations, etc. ; yet I con- 
fess, Sir, I have been anxious upon many accounts, with re- 
spect as well to the service itself as my own safety, lest my 
lord may think himself ill-served by me, even when I have 
best performed my duty. 

" I thought it therefore not only a debt to myself, but a 
duty to his lordship, that I should give his lordship a short 
account, as clear as I can, how far my former instructions em- 
powered me to act, and in a word w T hat this little piece of 
service is, for which I am so much a subject of his lordship's 
present favour and bounty. 

"It was in the Ministry of my Lord Townshend, when my 
Lord Chief Justice Parker, to whom I stand obliged for the 
favour, was pleased so far to state my case, that notwithstand- 
ing the misrepresentations under which I had suffered, and 
notwithstanding some mistakes which I was the first to ac- 
knowledge, I was so happy as to be believed in the profes- 
sions I made of a sincere attachment to the interest of the 
present Government, and, speaking with all possible humili- 
ty, I hope I have not dishonoured my Lord Parker's recom- 
mendation. 

" In considering, after this, which way I might be rendered 
most useful to the Government, it was proposed by my Lord 
Townshend that I should still appear as if I were, as before, 
under the displeasure of the Government, and separated from 
the Whigs ; and that I might be more serviceable in a kind 
of disguise than if I appeared openly ; and upon this foot a 
weekly paper, which I was at first directed to write, in oppo- 
sition to a scandalous paper called the Shift Shifted, was laid 
aside, and the first thing I engaged in was a monthly book 
called Mercurius Politicas, of which presently. In the inter- 
val of this, Dyer, the News-Letter writer, having been dead, 



viil] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 117 

and Dormer, his successor, being unable by his troubles to 
carry on that work, I had an offer of a share in the property, 
as well as in the management of that work. 

" I immediately acquainted my Lord Townshend of it, who, 
by Mr. Buckley, let me know it would be a very acceptable 
piece of service ; for that letter was really very prejudicial to 
the public, and the most difficult to come at in a judicial way 
in case of offence given. My lord was pleased to add, by Mr. 
Buckley, that he would consider my service in that case, as 
he afterwards did. 

" Upon this I engaged in it ; and that so far, that though 
the property was not wholly my own, yet the conduct and 
government of the style and news was so entirely in me, that 
I ventured to assure his lordship the sting of that mischievous 
paper should be entirely taken out, though it was granted 
that the style should continue Tory as it was, that the party 
might be amused and not set up another, which would have 
destroyed the design, and this part I therefore take entirely 
on myself still. 

" This went on for a year, before my Lord Townshend went 
out of the office ; and his lordship, in consideration of this 
service, made me the appointment which Mr. Buckley knows 
of, with promise of a further allowance as service presented. 

" My Lord Sunderland, to whose goodness I had many 
years ago been obliged, when I was in a secret commission 
sent to Scotland, was pleased to approve and continue this 
service, a&nd the appointment annexed ; and with his lord- 
ship's approbation, I introduced myself, in the disguise of a 
translator of the foreign news, to be so far concerned in this 
weekly paper of MlsVs as to be able to keep it within the 
circle of a secret management, also prevent the mischievous 
part of it ; and yet neither Mist, or any of those concerned 
with him, have the least guess or suspicion by whose direc- 
tion I do it. 

" But here it becomes necessary to acquaint my lord (as I 
hinted to you, Sir), that this paper, called the Journal, is not 



118 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

in myself in property, as the other, only in management; with 
this express difference, that if anything happens to be put in 
without my knowledge, which may give offence, or if any- 
thing slips my observation which may be ill-taken, his lord- 
ship shall be sure always to know whether he has a servant 
to reprove or a stranger to correct. 

" Upon the whole, however, this is the consequence, that by 
this management, the weekly Journal, and Dormer 's Letter, as 
also the Mercurius Politicus, which is in the same nature of 
management as the Journal, will be always kept (mistakes 
excepted) to pass as Tory papers and yet, be disabled and 
enervated, so as to do no mischief or give any offence to the 
Government." 

Others of the tell-tale letters show us in detail how De- 
foe acquitted himself of his engagements to the Govern- 
ment — bowing, as he said, in the house of Eimmon. In 
one he speaks of a traitorous pamphlet which he has stop- 
ped at the press, and begs the Secretary to assure his supe- 
riors, that he has the original in safe keeping, and that no 
eye but his own has seen it. In another he apologizes for 
an obnoxious paragraph which had crept into Misfs Jour- 
nal, avowing that " Mr. Mist did it, after I had looked over 
what he had gotten together," that he [Defoe] had no con- 
cern in it, directly or indirectly, and that he thought him- 
self obliged to notice this, to make good what he said in 
his last, viz. that if any mistake happened, Lord Stanhope 
should always know whether he had a servant to reprove 
or a stranger to punish. In another he expresses his alarm 
at hearing of a private suit against Morphew, the printer of 
the Mercurius Politicus, for a passage in that paper, and 
explains, first, that the obnoxious passage appeared tw T o 
years before, and was consequently covered by a capitula- 
tion giving him indemnity for all former mistakes ; sec- 
ondly, that the thing itself w r as not his, neither could any 



Tin.] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 119 

one pretend to charge it on him, and consequently it could 
not be adduced as proof of any failure in his duty. In 
another letter he gives an account of a new treaty with 
Mist. "I need not trouble you," he says, "with the par- 
ticulars, but in a word he professes himself convinced that 
he has been wrong, that the Government has treated him 
with lenity and forbearance, and he solemnly engages to 
me to give no more offence. The liberties Mr. Buckley 
mentioned, viz. to seem on the same side as before, to rally 
the Flying Post, the Whig writers, and even the word 
4 Whig,' &c, and to admit foolish and trifling things in fa- 
vour of the Tories. This, as I represented it to him, he 
agrees is liberty enough, and resolves his paper shall, for 
the future, amuse the Tories, but not affront the Govern- 
ment." If Mist should break through this understanding, 
Defoe hopes it will be understood that it is not his fault ; 
he can only say that the printer's resolutions of amendment 
seem to be sincere. 

" In pursuance also of this reformation, he brought me this 
morning the enclosed letter, which, indeed, I was glad to see, 
because, though it seems couched in terms which might have 
been made public, yet has a secret gall in it, and a manifest 
tendency to reproach the Government with partiality and 
injustice, and (as it acknowledges expressly) was written to 
serve a present turn. As this is an earnest of his just inten- 
tion, I hope he will go on to your satisfaction. 

" Give me leave, Sir, to mention here a circumstance which 
concerns myself, and which, indeed, is a little hardship upon 
me, viz. that I seem to merit less, when I intercept a piece of 
barefaced treason at the Press, than when I stop such a letter 
as the enclosed ; because one seems to be of a kind which no 
man would dare to meddle with. But I would persuade my- 
self, Sir, that stopping such notorious things is not without 
its good effect, particularly because, as it is true that some 



120 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

people are generally found who clo venture to print any- 
thing that offers, so stopping them here is some discourage- 
ment and disappointment to them, and they often die in our 
hands. 

" I speak this, Sir, as well on occasion of what you were 
pleased to say upon that letter which 1 sent you formerly 
about Killing no Murder, as upon another with verses in it, 
which Mr. Mist gave me yesterday ; which, upon my word, 
is so villainous and scandalous that I scarce dare to send it 
without your order, and an assurance that my doing so shall 
be taken well, for I confess it has a peculiar insolence in it 
against His Majesty's person which (as blasphemous words 
against God) are scarce fit to be repeated." 

In the last of the series (of date June 13, 17 18), Defoe 
is able to assure his employers that "he believes the time 
is come when the journal, instead of affronting and offend- 
ing the Government, may many ways be made serviceable 
to the Government ; and he has Mr. M. so absolutely re- 
signed to proper measures for it, that he is persuaded he 
may answer for it." 

Following up the clue afforded by these letters, Mr. Lee 
has traced the history of Mists Journal under Defoe's 
surveillance. Mist did not prove so absolutely resigned 
to proper measures as his supervisor had begun to hope. 
On the contrary, he had frequent fits of refractory obsti- 
nacy, and gave a good deal of trouble both to Defoe and 
to the Government. Between them, however, they had 
the poor man completely in their power. When he yield- 
ed to the importunity of his Jacobite correspondents, or 
kicked against the taunts of the Whig organs about his 
wings being clipped — they, no more than he, knew how — 
his secret controllers had two ways of bringing him to rea- 
son. Sometimes the Government prosecuted him, wisely 
choosing occasions for their displeasure on which they 



viil] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 121 

were likely to have popular feeling on their side. At oth- 
er times Defoe threatened to withdraw and have nothing 
more to do with the Journal. Once or twice he carried 
this threat into execution. His absence soon told on the 
circulation, and Mist entreated him to return, making 
promises of good behaviour for the future. Further, De- 
foe commended himself to the gratitude of his uncon- 
scious dupe by sympathizing with him in his troubles, 
undertaking the conduct of the paper while he lay in pris- 
on, and editing two volumes of a selection of Miscellany 
Letters from its columns. At last, however, after eight 
years of this partnership, during which Mist had no suspi- 
cion of Defoe's connexion wuth the Government, the se- 
cret somehow seems to have leaked out. Such at least is 
Mr. Lee's highly probable explanation of a murderous at- 
tack made by Mist upon his partner. 

Defoe, of course, stoutly denied Mist's accusations, and 
published a touching account of the circumstances, de- 
scribing his assailant as a lamentable instance of ingrati- 
tude. Here w^as a man whom he had saved from the gal- 
lows, and befriended at his own risk in the utmost dis- 
tress, turning round upon him, " basely using, insulting, 
and provoking him, and at last drawing his sw^ord upon his 
benefactor." Defoe disarmed him, gave him his life, and 
sent for a surgeon to dress his w^ounds. But even this 
was not enough. Mist w^ould give him nothing but abuse 
of the worst and grossest nature. It almost shook Defoe's 
faith in human nature. Was there ever such ingratitude 
known before ? The most curious thing is that Mr. Lee, 
w T ho has brought all these facts to light, seems to share 
Defoe's ingenuous astonishment at this " strange instance 
of ungrateful violence," and conjectures that it must have 
proceeded from imaginary wrong of a very grievous nat- 

6* 



122 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

are, such, as a suspicion that Defoe had instigated the 
Government to prosecute him. It is perhaps as well that 
it should have fallen to so loyal an admirer to exhume De- 
foe's secret services and public protestations ; the record 
might otherwise have been rejected as incredible. 

Mr. Lee's researches were not confined to Defoe's rela- 
tions with Mist and his journal, and the other publications 
mentioned in the precious letter to Mr. de la Faye. Once 
assured that Defoe did not withdraw from newspaper- 
writing in 17 15, he ransacked the journals of the period 
for traces of his hand and contemporary allusions to his 
labours. A rich harvest rewarded Mr. Lee's zeal. Defoe's 
individuality is so marked that it thrusts itself through 
every disguise. A careful student of the Review, who had 
compared it with the literature of the time, and learnt his 
peculiar tricks of style and vivid ranges of interest, could 
not easily be at fault in identifying a composition of any 
length. Defoe's incomparable clearness of statement would 
alone betray him ; that was a gift of nature which no art 
could successfully imitate. Contemporaries also were quick 
at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their 
gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting 
as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether 
internal. Though Mr. Lee may have been rash sometimes 
in quoting little scraps of news as Defoe's, he must be ad- 
mitted to have established that, prodigious as was the num- 
ber and extent of the veteran's separate publications dur- 
ing the reign of the First George, it was also the most ac- 
tive period of his career as a journalist. Managing Mist 
and writing for his journal would have been work enough 
for an ordinary man ; but Defoe founded, conducted, and 
wrote for a host of other newspapers — the monthly Mercu- 
rius Politicus, an octavo of sixty-four pages (1716 — 1720) ; 



yiil] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 123 

the weekly Dormer's JVeivs- Letter (written, not printed, 
1716 — 17 18); the Whitehall Evening Post (a tri-weekly 
quarto-sheet, established 1718) ; the Daily Post (a daily 
single leaf, folio, established 1719) ; and Applebeds Journal 
(with which his connexion began in 1720 and ended in 
1726). 

The contributions to these newspapers which Mr. Lee 
has assigned, with great judgment it seems to me, to De- 
foe, range over a wide field of topics, from piracy and high- 
way robberies to suicide and the Divinity of Christ. De- 
foe's own test of a good writer was that he should at once 
please and serve his readers, and he kept this double object 
in view in his newspaper writings, as much as in Robinson 
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and the Family Instructor. Great 
as is the variety of subjects in the selections which Mr. 
Lee has made upon internal evidence, they are all of them 
subjects in which Defoe showed a keen interest in his ac- 
knowledged works. In providing amusement for his read- 
ers, he did not soar above his age in point of refinement ; 
and in providing instruction, he did not fall below his age 
in point of morality and religion. It is a notable circum- 
stance that one of the marks by which contemporaries 
traced his hand was " the little art he is truly master of, 
of forging a story and imposing it on the world for truth." 
Of this he gave a conspicuous instance in Misfs Journal 
in an account of the marvellous blowing up of the island 
of St. Vincent, which in circumstantial invention and force 
of description must be ranked among his master- pieces. 
But Defoe did more than embellish stories of strange 
events for his newspapers. He was a master of journal- 
istic art in all its branches, and a fertile inventor and or- 
ganizer of new devices. It is to him, Mr. Lee says, and 
his researches entitle him to authority, that we owe the 



124 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

prototype of the leading article, a Letter Introductory, as 
it became the fashion to call it, written on some subject 
of general interest and placed at the commencement of 
each number. The writer of this Letter Introductory was 
known as the " author " of the paper. 

Another feature in journalism which Defoe greatly help- 
ed to develop, if he did not actually invent, was the Jour- 
nal of Society. In the Review he had provided for the 
amusement of his readers by the device of a Scandal Club, 
whose transactions he professed to report. But political 
excitement was intense throughout the whole of Queen 
Anne's reign ; Defoe could afford but small space for 
scandal, and his Club was often occupied with fighting 
his minor political battles. When, however, the Hano- 
verian succession was secured, and the land had rest from 
the hot strife of parties, light gossip was more in request. 
Newspapers became less political, and their circulation 
extended from the coffee-houses, inns, and ale-houses to a 
new class of readers. " They have of late," a writer in 
Applebeds Journal says in 1725, "been taken in much by 
the women, especially the political ladies, to assist at the 
tea-table." Defoe seems to have taken an active part in 
making Mistfs Journal and Applebeds Journal, both Tory 
organs, suitable for this more frivolous section of the- pub- 
lie. This fell in with his purpose of diminishing the po- 
litical weight of these journals, and at the same time in- 
creased their sale. He converted them from rabid party 
agencies into registers of domestic news and vehicles of 
social disquisitions, sometimes grave, sometimes gay in 
subject, but uniformly bright and spirited in tone. 

The raw materials of several of Defoe's elaborate tales, 
such as Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, are to be found in 
the columns of Misfs and Applebee^s. In connexion with 



viii.] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 125 

Applebeds more particularly, Defoe went some way towards 
anticipating the work of the modern Special Correspond- 
ent. He apparently interviewed distinguished criminals 
in Newgate, and extracted from them the stories of their 
lives. Part of what he thus gathered he communicated to 
Applebee; sometimes, when the notoriety of the case jus- 
tified it, he drew up longer narratives and published them 
separately as pamphlets. He was an adept in the art of 
purling his own productions, whether books or journals. 
It may be doubted whether any American editor ever 
mastered this art more thoroughly than Defoe. Nothing, 
for instance, could surpass the boldness of Defoe's plan for 
directing public attention to his narrative of the robberies 
and escapes of Jack Sheppard. He seems to have taken a 
particular interest in this daring gaol-breaker. Mr. Lee, in 
fact, finds evidence that he had gained Sheppard' s affec- 
tionate esteem. He certainly turned his acquaintance to 
admirable account. He procured a letter for Applebee* s 
Journal from Jack, with a kind love," and a copy of verses 
of his own composition. Both letter and verses probably 
came from a more practised pen, but, to avert suspicion, 
the original of the letter was declared to be on view at 
Applebee's, and " well known to be in the handwriting of 
John Sheppard." Next Defoe prepared a thrilling narra- 
tive of Jack's adventures, which was of course described as 
written by the prisoner himself, and printed at his particu- 
lar desire. But this was not all. The artful author fur- 
ther arranged that when Sheppard reached his place of 
execution, he should send for a friend to the cart as he 
stood under the gibbet, and deliver a copy of the pam- 
phlet as his last speech and dying confession. A para- 
graph recording this incident was duly inserted in the 
newspapers. It is a crowning illustration of the inven- 



126 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

tive daring with which Defoe practised the tricks of his 
trade. 

One of Defoe's last works in connection with journal- 
ism was to write a prospectus for a new weekly periodical, 
the Universal Spectator, which was started by his son-in- 
law, Henry Baker, in October, 1728. There is more than 
internal and circumstantial evidence that this prospectus 
was Defoe's composition. When Baker retired from the 
paper five years afterwards, he drew up a list of the arti- 
cles which had appeared under his editorship, with the 
names of the writers attached. This list has been pre- 
served, and from it we learn that the first number, contain- 
ing a prospectus and an introductory essay on the qualifi- 
cations of a good writer, was written by Defoe. That ex- 
perienced journalist naturally tried to give an air of nov- 
elty to the enterprise. " If this paper," the first sentence 
runs, " was not intended to be what no paper at present 
is, w T e should never attempt to crowd in among such 
a throng of public writers as at this time oppress the 
town." In effect the scheme of the Universal Spectator 
was to revive the higher kind of periodical essays which 
made the reputation of the earlier Spectator. Attempts 
to follow in the wake of Addison and Steele had for so 
long ceased to be features in journalism ; their manner had 
been so effectually superseded by less refined purveyors of 
light literature — Defoe himself going heartily with the 
stream — that the revival was opportune, and in point of 
fact proved successful, the Universal Spectator continuing 
to exist for nearly twenty years. It shows how quickly 
the Spectator took its place among the classics, that the 
writer of the prospectus considered it necessary to depre- 
cate a charge of presumption in seeming to challenge com- 
parison. 



viil] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 127 

"Let no man envy us the celebrated title we have assumed, 
or charge us with arrogance, as if we bid the world expect 
great things from us. Must we have no power to please, un- 
less we come up to the full height of those inimitable per- 
formances ? Is there no wit or humour left because they are 
gone ? Is the spirit of the Spectators all lost, and their man- 
tle fallen upon nobody ? Have they said all that can be 
said? Has the world offered no variety, and presented no 
new scenes, since they retired from us ? Or did they leave 
off, because they were quite exhausted, and had no more to 
say ?" 

Defoe did not always speak so respectfully of the au- 
thors of the Spectator. If he had been asked why they 
left off, he would probably have given the reason con- 
tained in the last sentence, and backed his opinion by 
contemptuous remarks about the want of fertility in the 
scholarly brain. He himself could have gone on produ- 
cing for ever ; he was never gravelled for lack of matter, 
had no nice ideas about manner, and was sometimes sore 
about the superior respectability of those who had. But 
here he was on business, addressing people who looked 
back regretfully from the vulgarity of Mist's and Apple- 
bee's to the refinement of earlier periodicals, and making a 
bid for their custom. A few more sentences from his ad- 
vertisement will show how well he understood their preju- 
dices : — 

" The main design of this work is, to turn your thoughts a 
little off from the clamour of contending parties, which has 
so long surfeited you with their ill-timed politics, and restore 
your taste to things truly superior and sublime. 

" In order to this, we shall endeavour to present you with 
such subjects as are capable, if well handled, both to divert 
and to instruct you ; such as shall render conversation pleas- 
ant, and help to make mankind agreeable to one another. 



128 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

" As for our management of them, not to promise too much 
for ourselves, we shall only say we hope, at least, to make our 
w T ork acceptable to everybody, because we resolve, if possi- 
ble, to displease nobody. 

"We assure the world, by way of negative, that we shall 
engage in no quarrels, meddle with no parties, deal in no scan- 
dal, nor endeavour to make any men merry at the expense of 
their neighbours. In a word, we shall set nobody together 
by the ears. And though we have encouraged the ingenious 
world to correspond with us by letters, we hope they will not 
take it ill, that we say beforehand, no letters will be taken 
notice of by us which contain any personal reproaches, inter- 
meddle with family breaches, or tend to scandal or indecency 
of any kind. 

" The current papers are more than sufficient to carry on all 
the dirty work the town can have for them to do ; and what 
with party strife, politics, poetic quarrels, and all the other 
consequences of a wrangling age, they are in no danger of 
wanting employment ; and those readers who delight in such 
things, may divert themselves there. But our views, as is 
said above, lie another way." 

Good writing is what Defoe promises the readers of 
the Universal Spectator, and this leads him to consider 
what particular qualifications go to the composition, or, in 
a word, " what is required to denominate a man a good 
writer" His definition is worth quoting as a statement 
of his principles of composition. 

" One says this is a polite author ; another says, that is an 
excellent good writer ; and generally we find some oblique 
strokes pointed sideways at themselves; intimating that 
whether we think fit to allow it or not, they take themselves 
to be very good writers. And, indeed, I must excuse them 
their vanity; for if a poor author had not some good opinion 
of himself, especially when under the discouragement of hav- 



viii.] LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS. 129 

ing nobody else to be of his mincl, he would never write at 
all ; nay, he could not ; it would take off all the little dull 
edge that his pen might have on it before, and he would not 
be able to say one word to the purpose. 

" Now whatever may be the lot of this paper, be that as 
common fame shall direct, yet without entering into the 
enquiry who writes better, or who writes worse, I shall lay 
down one specific, by which you that read shall impartially 
determine who are, or are not, to be called good writers. In a 
word, the character of a good writer, wherever he is to be 
found, is this, viz., that he writes so as to please and serve at 
the same time. 

" If he writes to please, and not to serve, he is a flatterer and 
a hypocrite; if to serve and not to please, he turns cynic and 
satirist. The first deals in smooth falsehood, the last in 
rough scandal ; the last may do some good, though little ; 
the first does no good, and may do mischief, not a little ; the 
last provokes your rage, the first provokes your pride ; and in 
a word either of them is hurtful rather than useful. But the 
writer that strives to be useful, writes to serve you, and at 
the same time, by an imperceptible art, draws you on to be 
pleased also. He represents truth with plainness, virtue with 
praise; he even reprehends with a softness that carries the 
force of a satire without the salt of it ; and he insensibly 
screws himself into your good opinion, that as his writings 
merit your regard, so they fail not to obtain it. 

" This is part of the character by which I define a good 
writer ; I say 'tis but part of it, for it is not a half sheet that 
would contain the full description; a large volume would 
hardly suffice it. His fame requires, indeed, a very good 
writer to give it due praise ; and for that reason (and a good 
reason too) I go no farther with it." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE PLACE OF DEFOe's FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 

Those of my readers who liav r e thought of Defoe only as 
a writer of stories which young and old still love to read, 
must not be surprised that so few pages of this little book 
should be left for an account of his wort in that field. 
No doubt Defoe's chief claim to the world's interest is 
that he is the author of Robinson Crusoe. But there is 
little to be said about this or any other of Defoe's tales 
in themselves. Their art is simple, unique, incommunica- 
ble, and they are too well known to need description. On 
the other hand, there is much that is worth knowing and . 
not generally known about the relation of these works to 
his life, and the place that they occupy in the sum total of 
his literary activity. Hundreds of thousands since Defoe's- 
death, and millions in ages to come, would never have 
heard his name bat for Robinson Crusoe. To his contem- 
poraries the publication of that work was but a small in- 
cident in a career which for twenty years had claimed and 
held their interest. People in these days are apt to im- 
agine, because Defoe wrote the most fascinating of books., 
for children, that he was himself simple, child-like, frank, 
open, and unsuspecting. He has been so described by 
more than one historian of literature. It was not so that 
he appeared to his contemporaries, and it is not so that. 



chap, ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 131 

lie can appear to us when we know his life, unless we rec- 
ognise that lie took a child's delight in beatino; with, their 
own weapons the most astute intriguers in the most in- 
triguing period of English history. 

Defoe was essentially a journalist. He wrote for the 
day, and for the greatest interest of the greatest number 
of the day. He always had some ship sailing with the 
passing breeze, and laden with a useful cargo for the coast 
upon which the wind chanced to be blowing. If the 
Tichborne trial had happened in his time, we should cer- 
tainly have had from him an exact history of the boyhood 
and surprising adventures of Thomas Castro, commonly 
known as Sir Eoger, which would have come down to us 
as a true- record, take% perhaps, by the chaplain of Port- 
land prison from the convict's own lips. It would have 
had such an air of authenticity, and would have been cor- 
roborated by such an array of trustworthy witnesses, that 
nobody in later times could have doubted its truth. De- 
foe always wrote what a large number of people were m 
a mood to read. All his writings, with so few excep- 
tions that they may reasonably be supposed to fall within 
the category, were pieces cle circonstance. "Whenever any 
distinguished person died or otherwise engaged public at- 
tention, no matter how distinguished, whether as a politi- 
cian, a criminal, or a divine, Defoe lost no time in bring- 
ing out a biography. It was in such emergencies that he 
produced his memoirs of Charles XII. , Peter the Great, 
Count Patkul, the Duke of Shrewsbury, Baron de Goertz, 
the Rev. Daniel Williams, Captain Avery the King of the 
Pirates, Dominique Cartouche, Rob Roy, Jonathan Wild, 
Jack Sheppard, Duncan Campbell. When the day had 
been fixed for the Earl of Oxford's trial for high treason, 
Defoe issued the fictitious Minutes of the Secret Negotia- 



132 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

tions of Mons. Mesnager at the English Court during his 
ministry. We owe the Journal of the Plague in 1665 to 
a visitation which fell upon France in 1721, and caused 
much apprehension in England., The germ which in his 
fertile mind grew into Robinson Crusoe fell from the real 
adventures of Alexander Selkirk, whose solitary residence 
of four years on the island of Juan Fernandez was a nine 
days 1 wonder in the reign of Queen Anne. Defoe was too 
busy with his politics at the moment to turn it to account ; 
it was recalled to him later on, in the year 1719, when the 
exploits of famous pirates had given a vivid interest to the 
chances of adventurers in far-away islands on the Amer- 
ican and African coasts. The Life, Adventures, and Pi- 
racies of the famous Captain Singleton, who w T as set on 
shore in Madagascar, traversed the continent of Africa 
from east to west past the sources of the Nile, and went 
roving again in the company of the famous Captain Avery, 
was produced to satisfy the same demand. Such biogra- 
phies as those of Moll Flanders and the Lady Poxana 
were of a kind, as he himself illustrated by an amusing 
anecdote, that interested all times and all professions and 
degrees ; but we have seen to what accident he owed their 
suggestion and probably part of their materials. He had 
tested the market for such wares in his Journals of Society. 
In following Defoe's career, we are constantly remind- 
ed that he was a man of business, and practised the pro- 
fession of letters with a shrewd eye to the main chance. 
He scoffed at the idea of practising it with any other ob- 
ject, though he had aspirations after immortal fame as 
much as any of his more decorous contemporaries. Like 
Thomas Fuller, he frankly avowed that he wrote "for 
some honest profit to himself." Did any man, he asked, 
do anything without some regard to his own advantage? 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 133 

Whenever be tit upon a profitable vein, lie worked it to 
exhaustion, putting the ore into various shapes to attract 
different purchasers. Robinson Crusoe made a sensation; 
he immediately followed up the original story with a Sec- 
ond Part, and the Second Part with a volume of Serious 
Reflections, He had discovered the keenness of the public 
appetite for stories of the supernatural, in 1706, by means 
of his True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal. 1 
When, in 1720, he undertook to write the life of the pop* 
ular fortune-teller, Duncan Campbell — a pun: which illus- 
trates almost better than anything else Defoe's extraordi- 
nary ingenuity in putting a respectable face upon the most 
disreputable materials — he had another proof of the avid- 
ity with which people run to hear marvels. He followed 
up this clue with A System of Magic, or a History of the 
Black Art ; The Secrets of the Invisible World disclosed, 
or a Universal History of Apparitions ; and a humorous 
History of the Devil, in which last work he subjected Par- 
adise Lost, to which Addison had drawn attention by his 
papers in the Spectator, to very sharp criticism. In his 
books and pamphlets on the Behaviour of Servants, and 
his works of more formal instruction, the Family Instruc- 
tor, the Plan of English Commerce, the Complete English 
Tradesman, the Complete English Gentleman (his last 

1 Mr. Lee has disposed conclusively of the myth that this tale was 
written to promote the sale of a dull book by one Drelincourt on the 
Fear of Death, which Mrs. Yeal's -ghost earnestly recommended her 
friend to read. It was first published separately as a pamphlet with- 
out any reference to Drelincourt. It was not printed with Drelin- 
court's Fear of Death till the fourth edition of that work, which was 
already popular. Farther, the sale of Drelincourt does not appear to 
have been increased by the addition of Defoe's pamphlet to the book, 
and of Mrs. Veal's recommendation to the pamphlet. 



134 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap; 

work, left unfinished and unpublished), he wrote with a 
similar regard to what was for the moment in demand. 

Defoe's novel - writing thus grew naturally out of his 
general literary trade, and had not a little in common with 
the rest of his abundant stock. All his productions in 
this line, his masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, as well as what 
Charles Lamb calls his " secondary novels," Captain Single- 
ton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Moxana, were manu- 
factured from material for which he had ascertained that 
there was a market ; the only novelty lay in the mode of 
preparation. From writing biographies with real names 
attached to them, it was but a short step to writing biog- 
raphies with fictitious names. Defoe is sometimes spoken 
of as the inventor of the realistic novel ; realistic biogra- 
phy would, perhaps, be a more strictly accurate descrip- 
tion. Looking at the character of his professed records 
of fact, it seems strange that he should ever have thought 
of writing the lives of imaginary heroes, and should not 
have remained content with " forging stories and imposing 
them on the world for truth " about famous and notorious 
persons in real life. The purveyors of news in those days 
could use without fear of detection a licence which would 
not be tolerated now. They could not, indeed, satisfy the 
public appetite for news without taking liberties with the 
truth. They had not special correspondents in all parts 
of the world, to fill their pages with reports from the 
spot of things seen and heard. The public had acquired 
the habit of looking to the press, to periodical papers and 
casual books and pamphlets, for information about pass- 
ing events and prominent men before sufficient means had 
been organized for procuring information which should ap- 
proximate to correctness. In such circumstances, the temp- 
tation to invent and embellish was irresistible. " Why," 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IX HIS LIFE. 135 

a paragraph-maker of the time is made to say, " if we will 
write nothing but truth, we must bring you no news ; we 
are bound to bring you such as we can find." Yet it was 
not lies but truth that the public wanted as much as they 
do now. Hence arose the necessity of fortifying reports 
with circumstantial evidence of their authenticity. No- 
body rebuked unprincipled news -writers more strongly 
than Defoe, and no news-writer was half as copious in his 
guarantees for the accuracy of his information. When a 
report reached England that the island of St. Vincent had 
been blown into the air, Defoe wrote a description of the 
calamity, the most astonishing thing that had happened in 
the w r orld " since the Creation, or at least since the de- 
struction of the earth by water in the general Deluge," and 
prefaced his description by saying : — 

" Our accounts of this come from so many several hands 
and several places that it would be impossible to bring the 
letters all separately into this journal; and when we had 
done so or attempted to do so, would leave the story con- 
fused, and the world not perfectly informed. We have there- 
fore thought it better to give the substance of this amazing- 
accident in one collection ; making together as full and as 
distinct an account of the whole as we believe it possible to 
come at by any intelligence whatsoever, and at the close of 
this account we shall give some probable guesses at the nat- 
ural cause of so terrible an operation." 

Defoe carried the same system of vouching for the 
truth of his narratives by referring them to likely sources, 
into pamphlets and books which really served the purpose 
of newspapers, being written for the gratification of pass- 
ing interests. The History of the Wars of Charles XII., 
which Mr. Lee ascribes to him, was " written by a Scot's 
gentleman, in the Swedish service." The short narrative 



136 , DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

of the life and death of Count Patkul was " written by 
the Lutheran Minister who assisted him in his last hours, 
and faithfully translated out of a High Dutch manuscript." 
M. Mesnager's minutes of his negotiations were " written 
by himself," and " done out of French." Defoe knew that 
the public would read such narratives more eagerly if they 
believed them to be true, and ascribed them to authors 
whose position entitled them to confidence. There can be 
little doubt that he drew upon his imagination for more 
than the title-pages. But why, when he had so many emi- 
nent and notorious persons to serve as his subjects, with 
all the advantage of bearing names about which the public 
were already curious, did he turn to the adventures of new 
and fictitious heroes and heroines? One can only sup- 
pose that he was attracted by the greater freedom of move- 
ment in pure invention ; he made the venture with Robin- 
son Crusoe, it was successful, and he repeated it. But af- 
ter the success of Robinson Crusoe, he by no means aban- 
doned his old fields. It was after this that he produced 
autobiographies and other primd facie authentic lives of 
notorious thieves and pirates. With all his records of 
heroes, real or fictitious, he practised the same devices for 
ensuring credibility. In all alike he took for granted that 
the first question people would ask about a story was 
whether it was true. The novel, it must be remembered, 
was then in its infancy, and Defoe, as we shall presently 
see, imagined, probably not without good reason, that his 
readers would disapprove of story-telling for the mere pleas- 
ure of the thing, as an immorality. 

In writing for the entertainment of his own time, Defoe 
•took the surest way of writing for the entertainment of 
all time. Yet if he had never chanced to write Robinson 
Crusoe, he would now have a very obscure place in English 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 137 

literature. His " natural infirmity of homely plain writ- 
ing," as he humorously described it, might have drawn 
students to his works, but they ran considerable risk of ly- 
ing in utter oblivion. He was at war with the whole guild 
of respectable writers who have become classics ; they de- 
spised him as an illiterate fellow, a vulgar huckster, and 
never alluded to him except in terms of contempt. He 
was not slow to retort their civilities ; but the retorts might 
very easily have sunk beneath the waters, while the assaults 
were preserved by their mutual support. The vast mass 
of Defoe's writings received no kindly aid from distin- 
guished contemporaries to float them down the stream ; 
everything was done that bitter dislike and supercilious 
indifference could do to submerge them. Robinson Cru- 
soe was their sole life-buoy. 

It would be a mistake to suppose that the vitality of 
Robinson Crusoe is a happy accident, and that others of 
Defoe's tales have as much claim in point of merit to per- 
manence. Robinson Crusoe has lived longest, because it 
lives most, because it was detached as it were from its own 
time and organized for separate existence. It is the only 
one of Defoe's tales that shows what he could do as an 
artist. We might have seen from the others that he had 
the genius of a great artist ; here we have the possibility 
realized, the convincing proof of accomplished work. Moll 
Flanders is in some respects superior as a novel. Moll is 
a much more complicated character than the simple, open- 
minded, manly mariner of York ; a strangely mixed com- 
pound of craft and impulse, selfishness and generosity — 
in short, a thoroughly bad woman, made bad by circum- 
stances. In tracing the vigilant resolution with which she 
plays upon human weakness, the spasms of compunction 
which shoot across her wily designs, the selfish after- 

7 



138 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

thoughts which paralyse' her generous impulses, her fits of 
dare-devil courage and uncontrollable panic, and the steady 
current of good-humoured satisfaction with herself which 
makes her chuckle equally over mishaps and successes, De- 
foe has gone much more deeply into the springs of action, 
and sketched a much richer page in the natural history of 
his species than in Robinson Crusoe. True, it is a more 
repulsive page, but that is not the only reason why it has 
fallen into comparative oblivion, and exists now only as a 
parasite upon the more popular work. It is not equal- 
ly well constructed for the struggle of existence among 
books. No book can live for ever which is not firmly or- 
ganized round some central principle of life, and that prin- 
ciple in itself imperishable. It must have a heart and 
members ; the members must be soundly compacted and 
the heart superior to decay. Compared with Robinson 
Crusoe, Moll Flanders is only a string of diverting inci- 
dents, the lowest type of bopk organism, very brilliant 
while it is fresh and new, but not qualified to survive com- 
petitors for the world's interest. There is no unique crea- 
tive purpose in it to bind the whole together ; it might be 
cut into pieces, each capable of wriggling amusingly by it- 
self. The gradual corruption of the heroine's virtue, which 
is the encompassing scheme of the tale, is too thin as well 
as too common an artistic envelope ; the incidents burst 
through it at so many points that it becomes a shapeless 
mass. But in Robinson Crusoe we have real growth from 
a vigorous germ. The central idea round which the tale 
is organized, the position of a man cast ashore on a desert 
island, abandoned to his own resources, suddenly shot be- 
yond help or counsel from his fellow-creatures, is one that 
must live as long as the uncertainty of human life. 

The germ of Robinson Crusoe, the actual experience of 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 139 

Alexander Selkirk, went floating about for several years, 
and more than one artist dallied with it, till it finally set- 
tled and took root in the mind of the one man of his gen- 
eration most capable of giving it a home and working out 
its artistic possibilities. Defoe was the only man of letters 
in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island 
without finding himself at a loss what to do. The art re- 
quired for developing the position in imagination was not 
of a complicated kind, and yet it is one of the rarest of 
gifts. Something more was wanted than simply conceiv- 
ing what a man in such a situation would probably feel 
and probably do. Above all, it was necessary that his 
perplexities should be unexpected, and his expedients for 
meeting them unexpected; yet both perplexities and ex- 
pedients so real and life-like that, when we were told them, 
we should wonder we had not thought of them before. 
One gift was indispensable for this, however many might 
be accessory, the genius of circumstantial invention — not 
a very exalted order of genius, perhaps, but quite as rare 
as any other intellectual prodigy. 1 

Defoe was fifty-eight years old when he wrote Robinson 
Crusoe, If the invention of plausible circumstances is the 
great secret in the art of that tale, it would have been a 
marvellous thing if this had been the first instance of its 
exercise, and it had broken out suddenly in a man of so 
advanced an age. When we find an artist of supreme ex- 
cellence in any craft, we generally find that he has been 
practising it all his life. To say that he has a genius for 
it, means that he has practised it, and concentrated his 
main force upon it, and that he has been driven irresisti- 

1 Mr. Leslie Stephen seems to me to underrate the rarity of this 
peculiar gift in his brilliant essay on Defoe's Novels in Hours in a 
Library. 



140 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

bly to do so by sheer bent of nature. It was so with De- 
foe and his power of circumstantial invention, his unrival- 
led genius for " lying like truth." For years upon years 
of his life it had been his chief occupation. From the 
time of his first connexion with Harley, at least, he had 
addressed his countrymen through the press, and had per- 
ambulated the length and breadth of the land in assumed 
characters and on factitious pretexts. His first essay in 
that way in 1704, when he left prison in the service of the 
Government, appealing to the general compassion because 
he was under government displeasure, was skilful enough 
to suggest great native genius if not extensive previous 
practice. There are passages of circumstantial invention 
in the Revieiv, as ingenious as anything in Robinson Cru- 
soe; and the mere fact that at the end of ten years of 
secret service under successive Governments, and in spite 
of a widespread opinion of his untrustworthiness, he was 
able to pass himself off for ten years more as a Tory with 
Tories and with the Whig Government as a loyal servant, 
is a proof of sustained ingenuity of invention greater than 
many volumes of fiction. 

Looking at Defoe's private life, it is not difficult to un- 
derstand the peculiar fascination which such a problem as 
he solved in Robinson Crusoe must have had for him. It 
was not merely that he had passed a life of uncertainty, 
often on the verge of precipices, and often saved from ruin 
by a buoyant energy which seems almost miraculous ; not 
merely that, as he said of himself in one of his diplomatic 
appeals for commiseration, 

" No man hath tasted differing fortunes more, 
For thirteen times have I been rich and poor." 

But when he w T rote Robinson Crusoe, it was one of the 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 141 

actual chances of his life, and by no means a remote one, 
that he might be cast all alone on an uninhabited island. 
We see from his letters to De la Faye how fearful he 
was of having " mistakes " laid to his charge by the Gov- 
ernment in the course of his secret services. His former 
changes of party had exposed him, as he well knew, to sus- 
picion. A false step, a misunderstood paragraph, might 
have had ruinous consequences for him. If the Govern- 
ment had prosecuted him for writing anything offensive 
to them, refusing to believe that it was put in to amuse 
the Tories, transportation might very easily have been the 
penalty. He had made so many enemies in the Press 
that he might have been transported without a voice be- 
ing raised in his favour, and the mob would not have in- 
terfered to save a Government spy from the Plantations. 
Shipwreck among the islands of the West Indies was a 
possibility that stood not far from his own door, as he 
looked forward into the unknown, and prepared his mind, 
as men in dangerous situations do, for the worst. When 
he drew up for Moll Flanders and her husband a list of 
the things necessary for starting life in a new country, or 
when he described Colonel Jack's management of his plan- 
tation in Virginia, the subject was one of more than gen- 
eral curiosity to him ; and when he exercised his imagina- 
tion upon the fate of Robinson Crusoe, he was contemplat- 
ing a fate which a few movements of the wheel of Fortune 
might make his own. 

But whatever it was that made the germ idea of Robin- 
son Crusoe take root in Defoe's mind, he worked it out as 
an artist. Artists of a more emotional type might have 
drawn much more elaborate and affecting word -pictures 
of the mariner's feelings in various trying situations, gone 
much deeper into his changing moods, and shaken our 



142 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

souls with pity and terror over the solitary castaway's 
alarms and fits of despair. Defoe's aims lay another way. 
His Crusoe is not a man given to the luxury of grieving. 
If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been un- 
done. Perhaps Defoe's imaginative force was not of a 
kind that could have done justice to the agonies of a ship- 
wrecked sentimentalist ; he has left no proof that it was ; 
but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning his misfort- 
unes, brooding over his fears, or sighing w T ith Ossianic sor- 
row over his lost companions and friends, he would have 
spoiled the consistency of the character. The lonely man 
had his moments of panic and his days of dejection, but 
they did not dwell in his memory. Defoe no doubt fol- 
lowed his own natural bent, but he also showed true art 
in confining Crusoe's recollections as closely as he does to 
his efforts to extricate himself from difficulties that would 
have overwhelmed a man of softer temperament. The 
subject had fascinated him, and he found enough in it to 
engross his powers without travelling beyond its limits for 
diverting episodes, as he does more or less in all the rest 
of his tales. The diverting episodes in Robinson Crusoe 
all help the verisimilitude of the story. 

When, however, the ingenious inventor had completed 
the story artistically, carried us through all the outcast's 
anxieties and efforts, and shown him triumphant over all 
difficulties, prosperous, and again in communication with 
the outer world, the spirit of the iterary trader would not 
let the finished work alone. The story, as a work of art, 
ends with Crusoe's departure from the island, or at any 
rate with his return to England. Its unity is then com- 
plete. But Kobinson Crusoe at once became a popular 
hero, and Defoe was too keen a man of business to miss 
the chance of further profit from so lucrative a vein. He 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 143 

did not mind the sneers of hostile critics. They made mer- 
ry over the trifling inconsistencies in the tale. How, for 
example, they asked, could Crusoe have stuffed his pockets 
with biscuits when he had taken off all his clothes before 
swimming to the wreck ? How could he have been at 
such a loss for clothes after those he had put off were 
washed away by the rising tide, when he had the ship's 
stores to choose from? Plow could he have seen the 
goat's eyes in the cave when it was pitch dark? How 
could the Spaniards give Friday's father an agreement in 
writing, when they had neither paper nor ink ? How did 
Friday come to know so intimately the habits of bears, 
the bear not being a denizen of the West Indian islands ? 
On the ground of these and such-like trifles, one critic de- 
clared that the book seems calculated for the mob, and 
will not bear the eye of a rational reader, and that " all 
but the very canaille are satisfied of the worthlessness of 
the performance." Defoe, we may suppose, was not much 
moved by these strictures, as edition after edition of the 
work was demanded. He corrected one or two little inac- 
curacies, and at once set about writing a Second Part, and 
a volume of Serious Reflections which had occurred to 
Crusoe amidst his adventures. These were purely com- 
mercial excrescences upon the original work. They were 
popular enough at the time, but those who are tempted 
now to accompany Crusoe in his second visit to his island 
and his enterprising travels in the East, agree that the Sec- 
ond Part is of inferior interest to the first, and very few 
now read the Serious Reflections. 

The Serious Reflections, however, are well worth reading 
in connexion with the authors personal history. In the 
preface we are told that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory, 
and in one of the chapters we are told why it is an alle- 



144 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

gory. The explanation is given in a homily against the 
vice of talking falsely. By talking falsely the moralist 
explains that he does not mean telling lies, that is, false- 
hoods concocted with an evil object ; these he puts aside 
as sins altogether beyond the pale of discussion. But 
there is a minor vice of falsehood which he considers it 
his duty to reprove, namely, telling stories, as too many 
people do, merely to amuse. This supplying a story by 
invention," he says, "is certainly a most scandalous crime, 
and yet very little regarded in that part. It is a sort of 
lying that makes a great hole in the heart, in which by 
degrees a habit of lying enters in. Such a man comes 
quickly up to a total disregarding the truth of what he 
says, looking upon it as a trifle, a thing of no import, 
whether any story he tells be true or not." How empty 
a satisfaction is this "purchased at so great an expense 
as that of conscience, and of a dishonour done to truth !" 
And the crime is so entirely objectless. A man who tells 
a lie, properly so called, has some hope of reward by it. 
But to lie for sport is to play at shuttlecock with your 
soul, and load your conscience for the mere sake of being 
a fool. " AYith what temper should I speak of those peo- 
ple ? What words can express the meanness and baseness 
of the mind that can do this V In making this protest 
against frivolous story-telling, the humour of which must 
have been greatly enjoyed by his journalistic colleagues, 
Defoe anticipated that his readers w^ould ask why, if he so 
disapproved of the supplying a story by invention, he had 
written Robinson Crusoe. His answer was that Robinson 
Crusoe was an allegory, and that the telling or writing a 
parable or an allusive allegorical history is quite a differ- 
ent case. " I, Robinson Crusoe, do affirm that the story, 
though allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 145 

beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfort- 
unes, and of a variety not to be met with in this world." 
This life was his own. He explains at some length the 
particulars of the allegory : — 

" Thus the fright and fancies which succeeded the story 
of the print of a man's foot, and surprise of the old goat, and 
the thing rolling on my bed, and my jumping up in a fright, 
are all histories and real stories ; as are likewise the dream 
of being taken by messengers, being arrested by officers, the 
manner of being driven on shore by the surge of the sea, the 
ship on fire, the description of starving, the story of my man 
Friday, and many more most natural passages observed here, 
and on which any religious reflections are made, are all his- 
torical and true in fact. It is most real that I had a parrot, 
and taught it to call me by my name, such a servant a savage 
and afterwards a Christian, and that his name was called Fri- 
day, and that he was ravished from me by force, and died in 
the hands that took him, which I represent by being killed ; 
this is all literally true ; and should I enter into discoveries 
many alive can testify them. His other conduct and assist- 
ance to me also have just references in all their parts to the 
helps I had from that faithful savage in my real solitudes 
and disasters. 

" The story of the bear in the tree, and the fight with the 
wolves in the snow, is likewise matter of real history ; and 
in a word, the adventures of Eobinson Crusoe are a whole 
scheme of a life of twenty-eight years spent in the most wan- 
dering, desolate, and afflicting circumstances that ever man 
went through, and in which I have lived so long in a life of 
wonders, in continued storms, fought with the worst kind of 
savages and man-eaters, by unaccountable surprising inci- 
dents ; fed by miracles greater than that of the ravens, suf- 
fered all manner of violences and oppressions, injurious re- 
proaches, contempt of men, attacks of devils, corrections from 
Heaven, and oppositions on earth ; and had innumerable ups 



146 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

and downs in matters of fortune, been in slavery worse than 
Turkish, escaped by an exquisite management, as that in the 
story of Xury and the boat of Sallee, been taken up at sea 
• in distress, raised again and depressed again, and that of- 
tener perhaps in one man's life than ever was known before ; 
shipwrecked often, though more by land than by sea ; in a 
word, there's not a circumstance in the imaginary story but 
has its just allusion to a real story, and chimes part for 
part, and step for step, with the inimitable life of Kobinson 
Crusoe." 

But if Defoe had such a regard for the strict and literal 
truth, why did he not tell his history in his own person ? 
Why convey the facts allusively in an allegory ? To this 
question also he had an answer. He wrote for the instruc- 
tion of mankind, for the purpose of recommending "in- 
vincible patience under the worst of misery ; indefatigable 
application and undaunted resolution under the greatest 
and most discouraging circumstances." 

" Had the common way of writing a man's private history 
been taken, and I had given you the conduct or life of a man 
you knew, and whose misfortunes and infirmities perhaps 
you had sometimes unjustly triumphed over, all I could have 
said would have yielded no diversion, and perhaps scarce 
have obtained a reading, or at best no attention ; the teacher, 
like a greater, having no honour in his own country." 

For all Defoe's profession that Robinson Crusoe is an 
allegory of his own life, it would be rash to take what 
he says too literally. The reader who goes to the tale in 
search of a close allegory, in minute chronological corre- 
spondence with the facts of the alleged original, will find, I 
expect, like myself, that he has gone on a wild-goose chase. 
There is a certain general correspondence. Defoe's own 
life is certainlv as instructive as Crusoe's in the lesson of 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 147 

invincible patience and undaunted resolution. The ship- 
wreck perhaps corresponds with his first bankruptcy, with 
which it coincides in point of time, having happened just 
twenty-eight years before. If Defoe had a real man Fri- 
day, who had learnt all his arts till he could practise them 
as well as himself, the fact might go to explain his enor- 
mous productiveness as an author. But I doubt whether 
the allegory can be pushed into such details. Defoe's 
fancy was quick enough to give an allegorical meaning to 
any tale. He might have found in Moll Flanders, with 
her five marriages and ultimate prostitution, correspond- 
ing to his own five political marriages and the dubious con- 
duct of his later years, a closer allegory in some respects 
than in the life of the shipwrecked sailor. The idea of 
calling Robinson Crusoe an allegory was in all probability 
an after-thought, perhaps suggested by a derisive parody 
which had appeared, entitled The life and strange surpris- 
ing adventures of Daniel de Foe, of London, Hosier, who 
lived all alone in the uninhabited island of Great Britain, 
and so forth. 

If we study any writing of Defoe's in connexion with 
the circumstances of its production, we find that it is 
manysided in its purposes, as full of side aims as a nave is 
full of spokes. These supplementary moral chapters to 
Robinson Crusoe, admirable as the reflections are in them- 
selves, and naturally as they are made to arise out of the 
incidents of the hero's life, contain more than meets the 
eye till we connect them with the author's position. Call- 
ing the tale an allegory served him in two ways. In the 
first place, it added to the interest of the tale itself by pre- 
senting it in the light of a riddle, which was left but half- 
revealed, though he declared after such explanation as he 
gave that " the riddle was now expounded, and the intelli- 



148 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

gent reader might see clearly the end and design of the 
whole work." In the second place, the allegory was such 
an image of his life as he wished, for good reasons, to im- 
press on the public mind. He had all along, as we have 
seen, while in the secret service of successive governments, 
vehemently protested his independence, and called Heaven 
and Earth to witness that he was a poor struggling, un- 
fortunate, calumniated man. It was more than ever neces- 
sary now when people believed him to be under the insu- 
perable displeasure of the Whigs, and he was really ren- 
dering them such dangerous service in connexion with the 
Tory journals, that he should convince the world of his 
misfortunes and his honesty. The Serious Reflections 
consist mainly of meditations on Divine Providence in 
times of trouble, and discourses on the supreme importance 
of honest dealing. They are put into the mouth of Rob- 
inson Crusoe, but the reader is warned that they occurred 
to the author himself in the midst of real incidents in his 
own life. Knowing what public repute said of him, he 
does not profess never to have strayed from the paths of 
virtue, but he implies that he is sincerely repentant, and is 
now a reformed character. " Wild wicked Robinson Cru- 
soe does not pretend to honesty himself." He acknowl- 
edges his early errors. Not to do so would be a mistaken 
piece of false bravery. "All shame is cowardice. The 
bravest spirit is the best qualified for a penitent. He, 
then, that will be honest, must dare to confess that he has 
been a knave." But the man that has been sick is half a 
physician, and therefore he is both well fitted to counsel 
others, and being convinced of the sin and folly of his 
former errors, is of all men the least likely to repeat them. 
Want of courage was not a feature in Defoe's diplomacy. 
He thus boldly described the particular form of dishonesty 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 149 

with which, when he wrote the description, he was practis- 
ing upon the unconscious Mr. Mist. 

" There is an ugly word called cunning, which is very per- 
nicious to it [honesty], and which particularly injures it by 
hiding it from our discovery and making it hard to find. 
This is so like honesty that many a man has been deceived 
with it, and have taken one for t'other in the markets : nay, 
I have heard of some who have planted this wild honesty, as 
we may call it, in their own ground, have made use of it in 
their friendship and dealings, and thought it had been the 
true plant. But they always lost credit by it, and that was 
not the worst neither, for they had the loss who dealt with 
them, and who chaffered for a counterfeit commodity ; and 
we find many deceived so still, which is the occasion there is 
such an outcry about false friends, and about sharping and 
tricking in men's ordinary dealings with the world." 

A master-mind in the art of working a man, as Bacon 
calls it, is surely apparent here. Who could have suspect- 
ed the moralist of concealing the sins he was inclined to, 
by exposing and lamenting those very sins? There are 
other passages in the Serious Reflections which seem to 
have been particularly intended for Mist's edification. In 
reflecting what a fine thing honesty is, Crusoe expresses 
an opinion that it is much more common than is general- 
ly supposed, and gratefully recalls how often he has met 
with it in his own experience. He asks the reader to note 
how faithfully he was served by the English sailor's wid- 
ow, the Portuguese captain, the boy Xury, and his man 
Friday. From these allegoric types, Mist might select a 
model for his own behaviour. When we consider the tone 
of these Serious Reflections, so eminently pious, moral, 
and unpretending, so obviously the outcome of a wise, 
simple, ingenuous nature, we can better understand the 



150 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

fury with which Mist turned upon Defoe when at last he 
discovered his treachery. They are of use also in throw- 
ing light upon the prodigious versatility which could dash 
off a masterpiece in fiction, and, before the printer's ink 
was dry, be already at work making it a subordinate in- 
strument in a much wider and more wonderful scheme of 
activity, his own restless life. 

It is curious to find among the Serious Reflections a 
passage which may be taken as an apology for the prac- 
tices into which Defoe, gradually, we may reasonably be- 
lieve, allowed himself to fall. The substance of the apol- 
ogy has been crystallized into an aphorism by the author 
of Becky Sharp, but it has been, no doubt, the consoling 
philosophy of dishonest persons not altogether devoid of 
conscience in all ages. 

"Necessity makes an honest man a knave; and if the 
world was to be the judge, according to the common re- 
ceived notion, there would not be an honest poor man alive. 

"A rich man is an honest man, no thanks to him, for he 
would be a double knave to cheat mankind when he had no 
need of it. He has no occasion to prey upon his integrity, 
nor so much as to touch upon the borders of dishonesty. 
Tell me of a man that is a very honest man ; for he pays 
everybody punctually, runs into nobody's debt, does no man 
any wrong; very well, what circumstances is he in? Why, 
he has a good estate, a fine yearly income, and no business to 
do. The Devil must have full possession of this man, if he 
should be a knave ; for no man commits evil for the sake of 
it ; even the Devil himself has some farther design in sin- 
ning, than barely the wicked part of it. No man is so hard- 
ened in crimes as to commit them for the mere pleasure of 
the fact ; there is always some vice gratified ; ambition, pride, 
or avarice makes rich men knaves, and necessity the poor." 

This is Defoe's excuse for his backslidings put into the 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE. 151 

mouth of Robinson Crusoe. It might be inscribed also on 
the threshold of each of his fictitious biographies. Col- 
onel Jack, Moll Flanders, Roxana, are not criminals from 
malice ; they do not commit crimes for the mere pleasure 
of the fact. They all believe that but for the force of cir- 
cumstances they might have been orderly, contented, virt- 
uous members of society. 

A Colonel, a London Arab, a child of the criminal regi- 
ment, began to steal before he knew that it was not the 
approved way of making a livelihood. Moll and Roxana 
were overreached by acts against which they were too 
weak to cope. Even after they were tempted into taking 
the wrong turning, they did not pursue the downward 
road without compunction. Many good people might say 
of them, " There, but for the grace of God, goes myself." 
But it was not from the point of view of a Baxter or a 
Bunyan that Defoe regarded them, though he credited 
them with many edifying reflections. He was careful to 
say that he would never have written the stories of their 
lives, if he had not thought that they would be useful as 
awful examples of the effects of bad education and the 
indulgence of restlessness and vanity ; but he enters into 
their ingenious shifts and successes with a joyous sympa- 
thy that would have been impossible if their reckless ad- 
venturous living by their wits had not had a strong charm 
for him. We often find peeping out in Defoe's writings 
that roguish cynicism which we should expect in a man 
whose own life was so far from being; straightforward. 
He was too much dependent upon the public acceptance 
of honest professions to be eager in depreciating the value 
of the article, but when he found other people protesting 
disinterested motives, he could not always resist remind- 
ing them that they were no more disinterested than the 



152 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

Jack- pudding who avowed that he cured diseases from 
mere love of his kind. Having yielded to circumstances 
himself, and finding life enjoyable in dubious paths, he 
had a certain animosity against those who had maintained 
their integrity and kept to the highroad, and a correspond- 
ing pleasure in showing that the motives of the sinner 
were not after all so very different from the motives of 
the saint. 

The aims in life of Defoe's thieves and pirates are at 
bottom very little different from the ambition which he 
undertakes to direct in the Complete English Tradesman, 
and their maxims of conduct have much in common with 
this ideal. Self-interest is on the look-out, and Self-reli- 
ance at the helm. 

" A tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh and 
blood about him, no passions, no resentment ; he must never 
be angry — no, not so much as seem to be so, if a customer 
tumbles him five hundred pounds' worth of goods, and scarce 
bids money for anything ; nay, though they really come to 
his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what 
is to be sold, and though he knows they cannot be better 
pleased than they are at some other shop where they intend 
to buy, 'tis all one ; the tradesman must take it, he must place 
it to the account of his calling, that 'tis his business to be ill- 
used, and resent nothing; and so must answer as obligingly 
to those who give him an hour or two's trouble, and buy 
nothing, as he does to those who, in half the time, lay out 
ten or twenty pounds. The case is plain ; and if some do 
give him trouble, and do not buy, others make amends and 
do buy ; and as for the trouble, 'tis the business of the shop." 

All Defoe's heroes and heroines are animated by this 
practical spirit, this thoroughgoing subordination of means 
to ends. When they have an end in view, the plunder of 



ix.] PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IX HIS LIFE. 153 

a house, the capture of a ship, the ensnaring of a dupe, 
they allow neither passion, nor resentment, nor sentiment 
in any shape or form to stand in their way. Every other 
consideration is put on one side when the business of the 
shop has to be attended to. They are all tradesmen who 
have strayed into unlawful courses. They have nothing 
about them of the heroism of sin ; their crimes are not 
the result of ungovernable passion, or even of antipathy to 
conventional restraints ; circumstances and not any law- 
defying bias of disposition have made them criminals. 
How is it that the novelist contrives to make them so 
interesting? Is it because we are a nation of shopkeep- 
ers, and enjoy following lines of business which are a lit- 
tle out of our ordinary routine? Or is it simply that he 
makes us enjoy their courage and cleverness without think- 
ing of the purposes with which these qualities are dis- 
played? Defoe takes such delight in tracing their bold 
expedients, their dexterous intriguing and manoeuvring, 
that he seldom allows us to think of anything but the suc- 
cess or failure of their enterprises. Our attention is con- 
centrated on the game, and we pay no heed for the mo- 
ment to the players or the stakes. Charles Lamb says of 
The Complete English Tradesman that " such is the bent 
of the book to narrow and to degrade the heart, that if 
such maxims were as catching and infectious as those of a 
licentious cast, which happily is not the case, had I been 
living at that time, I certainly should have recommended 
to the grand jury of Middlesex, who presented The Fable 
of the Bees, to have presented this book of Defoe's in 
preference, as of a far more vile and debasing tendency. 
Yet if Defoe had thrown the substance of this book into 
the form of a novel, and shown us a tradesman rising by 
the sedulous practice of its maxims from errand-boy to 



154 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. ix. 

gigantic capitalist, it would Lave been hardly less interest- 
ing than his lives of successful thieves and tolerably suc- 
cessful harlots, and its interest would have been very much 
of the same kind, the interest of dexterous adaptation of 
means to ends. 



CHAPTER X. 

HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 

" The best step," Defoe says, after describing the charac- 
ter of a deceitful talker, "such a man can take is to lie 
on, and this shows the singularity of the crime ; it is a 
strange expression, but I shall make it out ; their way is, I 
say, to lie on till their character is completely known, and 
then they can lie no longer, for he whom nobody deceives 
can deceive nobody, and the essence of lying is removed ; 
for the description of a lie is that it is spoken to deceive, 
or the design is to deceive. Now he that nobody believes 
can never lie any more, because nobody can be deceived 
by him." 

Something like this seems to have happened to Defoe 
himself. He touched the summit of his worldly prosperi- 
ty about the time of the publication of Robinson Crusoe 
(1719). He was probably richer then than he had been 
when he enjoyed the confidence of King William, and was 
busy w 7 ith projects of manufacture and trade. He w r as no 
longer solitary in journalism. Like his hero, he had sev- 
eral plantations, and companions to help him in working 
them. He was connected w r ith four journals, and from 
this source alone his income must have been considerable. 
Besides this, he w r as producing separate works at the rate, 
on an average, of six a year, some of them pamphlets, 



156 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

some of them considerable volumes, all of them calculated 
to the wants of the time, and several of them extremely 
popular, running through three or four editions in as many 
months. Then he had his salary from the Government, 
which he delicately hints at in one of his extant letters as 
being overdue. Further, the advertisement of a lost pock- 
et-book in 1726, containing a list of Notes and Bills in 
which Defoe's name twice appears, seems to show that 
he still found time for commercial transactions outside lit- 
erature. 1 Altogether Defoe was exceedingly prosperous, 
dropped all pretence of poverty, built a large house at 
Stoke Newington, with stables and pleasure-grounds, and 
kept a coach. 

We get a pleasant glimpse of Defoe's life at this period 
from the notes of Henry Baker, the naturalist, who mar- 
ried one of his daughters and received his assistance, as we 
have seen, in starting The Universal Spectator. Baker, 
originally a bookseller, in 1724 set up a school for the deaf 
and dumb at Newington. There, according to the notes 
which he left of his courtship, he made the acquaintance 
of " Mr. Defoe, a gentleman well known by his writings, 
who had newly built there a very handsome house, as a 
retirement from London, and amused his time either in the 
cultivation of a large and pleasant garden, or in the pur- 
suit of his studies, which he found means of making very 
profitable." Defoe " was now at least sixty years of age, 
afflicted with the gout and stone, but retained all his 
mental faculties entire." The diarist goes on to say that 
he " met usually at the tea-table his three lovely daughters, 
who were admired for their beauty, their education, and 
their prudent conduct; and if sometimes Mr. Defoe's dis- 
orders made company inconvenient, Mr. Baker was enter- 
1 Lee's Life, vol. i. pp. 406-7. 






x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 157 

tained by them either singly or together, and that com- 
monly in the garden when the weather was favourable." 
Mr. Baker fixed his choice on Sophia, the youngest daugh- 
ter, and, being a prudent lover, began negotiations about 
the marriage portion, Defoe's part in which is also charac- 
teristic. a He knew nothing of Mr. Defoe's circumstances, 
only imagined, from his very genteel way of living, that 
he must be able to give his daughter a decent portion ; he 
did not suppose a large one. On speaking to Mr. Defoe, 
he sanctioned his proposals, and said he hoped he should 
be able to give her a certain sum specified; but when 
urged to the point some time afterwards, his answer was 
that formal articles he thought unnecessary ; that he could 
confide in the honour of Mr. Baker ; that when they 
talked before, he did not know the true state of his own 
affairs ; that he found he could not part with any money 
at present ; but at his death his daughter's portion would 
be more than he had promised ; and he offered his own 
bond as security." The prudent Mr. Baker would not 
take his bond, and the marriage was not arranged till two 
years afterwards, when Defoe gave a bond for £500 pay- 
able at his death, eno-aoing- his house at Newino;ton as 
security. 

Very little more is known about Defoe's family, except 
that his eldest daughter married a person of the name of 
Langley, and that he speculated successfully in South Sea 
Stock in the name of his second daughter, and afterwards 
settled upon her an estate at Colchester worth £1020. 
His second son, named Benjamin, became a journalist, was 
the editor of the London Journal, and got into temporary 
trouble for writing a scandalous and seditious libel in that 
newspaper in 1721. A writer in Applebe^s Journal, whom 
Mr. Lee identifies with Defoe himself, commenting upon 



158 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

this circumstance, denied the rumour of its being the well- 
known Daniel Defoe that was committed for the offence. 
The same writer declared that it was known " that the 
young Defoe was but a stalking-horse and a tool, to bear 
the lash and the pillory in their stead, for his wages ; that 
he was the author of the most scandalous part, but was 
only made sham proprietor of the whole, to screen the 
true proprietors from justice." 

This son does not appear in a favourable light in the 
troubles which soon after fell upon Defoe, when Mist dis- 
covered his connexion with the Government. Foiled in 
his assault upon him, Mist seems to have taken revenge by 
spreading the fact abroad, and all Defoe's indignant de- 
nials and outcries against Mist's ingratitude do not seem 
to have cleared him from suspicion. Thenceforth the 
printers and editors of journals held aloof from him. 
Such is Mr. Lee's fair interpretation of the fact that his 
connexion with Ajpplebeds Journal terminated abruptly in 
March, 1726, and that he is found soon after, in the pref- 
ace to a pamphlet on Street Robberies, complaining that 
none of the journals will accept his communications. 
"Assure yourself, gentle reader," he says, 1 " I had not pub- 
lished my project in this pamphlet, could I have got it in- 
serted in any of the journals without feeing the journalists 
or publishers. I cannot but have the vanity to think they 
might as well have inserted what I send them, gratis, as 
many things I have since seen in their papers. But I have 
not only had the mortification to find what I sent rejected, 
but to lose my originals, not having taken copies of what 
I wrote." In this preface Defoe makes touching allusion 
to his age and infirmities. He begs his readers to " excuse 
the vanity of an over- officious old man, if, like Cato, he 
1 Lee's Life, vol. i. p. 418. 



x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 159 

inquires whether or no before he goes hence and is no 
more, he can yet do anything for the service of his coun- 
try." "The old man cannot trouble you long ; take, then, 
in good part his best intentions, and impute his defects to 
age and weakness." 

This preface was written in 1728; what happened to 
Defoe in the following year is much more difficult to un- 
derstand, and is greatly complicated by a long letter of his 
own which has been preserved. Something had occurred, 
or w T as imagined by him to have occurred, which com- 
pelled him to fly from his home and go into hiding. He 
was at work on a book to be entitled The Complete Eng- 
lish Gentleman, Part of it was already in type when he 
broke off abruptly in September, 1729, and fled. In Au- 
gust, 1730, he sent from a hiding-place, cautiously de- 
scribed as being about two miles from Greenwich, a letter 
to his son-in-law, Baker, which is our only clue to what had 
taken place. It is so incoherent as to suggest that the old 
man's prolonged toils and anxieties had at last shaken his 
reason, though not his indomitable self-reliance. Baker 
apparently had written complaining that he was debarred 
from seeing him. " Depend upon my sincerity for this," 
Defoe answers, " that I am far from debarring you. On 
the contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than any 
I now enjoy that I could have your agreeable visits with 
safety, and could see both you and my dear Sophia, could 
it be without giving her the grief of seeing her father 
in tenebris, and under the load of insupportable sorrows." 
He gives a touching description of the griefs which are 
preying upon his mind. 

"It is not the blow I received from a wicked, perjured, 
and contemptible enemy that has broken in upon my spirit; 
which, as she well knows, has carried me on through greater 



160 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

disasters than these. Bat it has been the injustice, unkind- 
ness, and, I must say inhuman, dealing of my own son, which 
has both ruined my family, and in a word has broken my 
heart. ... I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up 
my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he 
has no compassion, but suffers them and their poor dying 
mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as it 
were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides 
the most sacred promises, to supply them with, himself at 
the same time living in a profusion of plenty. It is too 
much for me. Excuse my infirmity, I can say no more ; my 
heart is too full. I only ask one thing of you as a dying re- 
quest. Stand by them when I am gone, and let them not be 
wronged while he is able to do them right. Stand by them 
as a brother ; and if you have anything within you owing to 
my memory, who have bestowed on you the best gift I have 
to give, let them not be injured and trampled on by false 
pretences and unnatural reflections. I hope they will want 
no help but that of comfort and council ; but that they will 
indeed want, being too easy to be managed by words and 
promises." 

The postscript to the letter shows that Baker had writ- 
ten to him about selling the house, which, it may be re- 
membered, was the security for Mrs. Baker's portion, and 
had inquired about a policy of assurance. " I wrote you 
a letter some months ago, in answer to one from you, 
about selling the house; but you never signified to me 
whether you received it. I have not the policy of assur- 
ance ; I suppose my wife, or Hannah, may have it." Bak- 
er's ignoring the previous letter about the house seems to 
signify that it was unsatisfactory. He apparently wished 
for a personal interview with Defoe. In the beginning of 
the present letter Defoe had said that, though far from de- 
barring a visit from his son-in-law, circumstances, much to 



x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 161 

his sorrow, made it impossible that he could receive a visit 
from anybody. After the charge against his son, which 
we have quoted, he goes on to explain that it is impos- 
sible for him to go to see Mr. Baker. His family appar- 
ently had been ignorant of his movements for some time. 
" I am at a distance from London, in Kent ; nor have I a 
lodging in London, nor have I been at that place in the 
Old Bailey since I wrote you I was removed from it. At 
present I am weak, having had some fits of a fever that 
have left me low." He suggests, indeed, a plan by which 
he might see his son-in-law and daughter. He could not 
bear to make them a single flying visit. " Just to come 
and look at you and retire immediately, 'tis a burden too 
heavy. The parting will be a price beyond the enjoy- 
ment. But if they could find a retired lodging for him 
at Enfield, " where he might not be known, and might 
have the comfort of seeing them both now and then, upon 
such a circumstance he could gladly give the days to soli- 
tude to have the comfort of half an hour now and then 
with them both for two or three weeks." Nevertheless, 
as if he considered this plan out of the question, he ends 
with a touching expression of grief that, being near his 
journey's end, he may never see them again. It is impos- 
sible to avoid the conclusion that he did not wish to see 
his son-in-law, and that Baker wished to see him about 
money matters, and suspected him of evading an interview. 
Was this evasion the cunning of incipient madness ? 
Was his concealing his hiding-place from his son-in-law 
an insane development of that self-reliant caution, which 
for so many years of his life he had been compelled to 
make a habit, in the face of the most serious risks ? Why 
did he give such an exaggerated colour to the infamous 
conduct of his son ? It is easy to make out from the pas- 

8 



162 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

sage I have quoted, what his son's guilt really consisted in. 
Defoe had assigned certain property to the son to be held 
in trust for his wife and daughters. The son had not se- 
cured them in the enjoyment of this provision, but main- 
tained them, and gave them words and promises, with 
which they were content, that he would continue to main- 
tain them. It was this that Defoe called making them 
" beg their bread at his door, and crave as if it were an 
alms" the provision to which they were legally entitled. 
Why did Defoe vent his grief at this conduct in such 
strong language to his son-in-law, at the same time enjoin- 
ing him to make a prudent use of it? Baker had written 
to his father-in-law making inquiry about the securities 
for his wife's portion ; Defoe answers with profuse expres- 
sions of affection, a touching picture of his old age and 
feebleness, and the imminent ruin of his family through 
the possible treachery of the son to whom he has entrust- 
ed their means of support, and an adjuration to his son-in- 
law to stand by them with comfort and counsel when he 
is gone. The inquiry about the securities he dismisses in 
a postscript. He will not sell the house, and he does not 
know who has the policy of assurance. 

One thing and one thing only shines clearly out of the 
obscurity in which Defoe's closing years are wrapt — his 
earnest desire to make provision for those members of his 
family who could not provide for themselves. The pur- 
suit from which he was in hiding, was in all probability 
the pursuit of creditors. We have seen that his income 
must have been large from the year 1718 or thereabouts, 
till his utter loss of credit in journalism about the year 
1726; but he may have had old debts. It is difficult to 
explain otherwise why he should have been at such pains, 
when he became prosperous, to assign property to his chil- 



x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS EXD. 163 

dren. There is evidence, as early as 1720, of his making 
over property to his daughter Hannah, and the letter from 
which I have quoted shows that he did not hold his New- 
ington estate in his own name. In this letter he speaks 
of a perjured, contemptible enemy as the cause of his mis- 
fortunes. Mr. Lee conjectures that this w r as Mist, that 
Mist had succeeded in embroiling him with the Govern- 
ment by convincing them of treachery in his secret ser- 
vices, and that this was the hue and cry from which he 
fled. But it is hardly conceivable that the Government 
could have listened to charges brought by a man whom 
they had driven from the country for his seditious prac- 
tices. It is much more likely that Mist and his support- 
ers had sufficient interest to instigate the revival of old 
pecuniary claims against Defoe. 

It would have been open to suppose that the fears 
which made the old man a homeless wanderer and fugi- 
tive for the last two years of his life, were wholly imagi- 
nary, but for the circumstances of his death. He died of 
a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in 
Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields. In September, 1733, as 
the books in Doctors' Commons show, letters of adminis- 
tration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary 
Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official 
form the next of kin to appear. Now, if Defoe had been 
driven from his home by imaginary fears, and had baffled 
with the cunning of insane suspicion the efforts of his 
family to bring him back, there is no apparent reason why 
they should not have claimed his effects after his death. 
He could not have died unknown to them, for place and 
time were recorded in the newspapers. His letter to his 
son-in-law, expressing the warmest affection for all his 
family except his son, is sufficient to prevent the horrible 



164 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

notion that he might have been driven forth like Lear by 
his undutif ill children after he had parted his goods among 
them. If they had been capable of such unnatural con- 
duct, they would not have failed to secure his remaining 
property. Why, then, were his goods and chattels left 
to a creditrix? Mr. Lee ingeniously suggests that Mary 
Brooks was the keeper of the lodging where he died, and 
that she kept his personal property to pay rent and per- 
haps funeral expenses. A much simpler explanation, which 
covers most of the known facts without casting any un- 
warranted reflections upon Defoe's children, is that when 
his last illness overtook him he was still keeping out of the 
way of his creditors, and that everything belonging to him 
in his own name was legally seized. But there are doubts 
and difficulties attending any explanation. 

Mr. Lee has given satisfactory reasons for believing that 
Defoe did not, as some of his biographers have supposed, 
die in actual distress. Ropemaker's Alley in Moorfields 
was a highly respectable street at the beginning of last 
century ; a lodging there was far from squalid. The prob- 
ability is that Defoe subsisted on his pension from the 
Government during his last two years of wandering; and 
suffering though he w r as from the infirmities of age, yet 
wandering was less of a hardship than it would have been 
to other men, to one who had been a wanderer for the 
greater part of his life. At the best it was a painful and 
dreary ending for so vigorous a life, and unless we piti- 
lessly regard it as a retribution for his moral defects, it is 
some comfort to think that the old man's infirmities and 
anxieties were not aggravated by the pressure of hopeless 
and helpless poverty. Nor do I think that he was as dis- 
tressed as he represented to his son-in-law by apprehen- 
sions of ruin to his family after his death, and suspicions 



x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 165 

of the honesty of his son's intentions. There is a half in- 
sane tone about his letter to Mr. Baker, but a certain meth- 
od may be discerned in its incoherencies. My own read- 
ing of it is that it was a clever evasion of his son-in-law's 
attempts to make sure of his share of the inheritance. We 
have seen how shifty Defoe was in the original bargaining 
about his daughter's portion, and we know from his novels 
what his views were about fortune-hunters, and with what 
delight he dwelt upon the arts of outwitting them. He 
probably considered that his youngest daughter was suffi- 
ciently provided for by her marriage, and he had set his 
heart upon making provision for her unmarried sisters. 
The letter seems to me to be evidence, not so much of 
fears for their future welfare, as of a resolution to leave 
them as much as he could. Two little circumstances seem 
to show that, in spite of his professions of affection, there 
w r as a coolness between Defoe and his son-in-law. He 
wrote only the prospectus and the first article for Baker's 
paper, the Universal Spectator, and wdien he died, Baker 
contented himself w T ith a simple intimation of the fact. 

If my reading of this letter is right, it might stand as a 
type of the most strongly marked characteristic in Defoe's 
political writings. It was a masterly and utterly unscrupu- 
lous piece of diplomacy for the attainment of a just and 
benevolent end. This may appear strange after what I 
have said about Defoe's want of honesty, yet one cannot 
help coming to this conclusion in looking back at his polit- 
ical career before his character underwent its final degrada- 
tion. He was a great, a truly great liar, perhaps the great- 
est liar that ever lived. His dishonesty went too deep to 
be called superficial, yet, if we go deeper still in his rich 
and strangely mixed nature, we come upon stubborn founda- 
tions of conscience. Among contemporary comments on 



166 DANIEL DEFOE. [chap. 

the occasion of his death, there was one which gave perfect 
expression to his political position. " His knowledge of 
men, especially those in high life (with w T hom he was for- 
merly very conversant) had weakened his attachment to any 
political party ; but, in the main, he was in the interest of 
civil and religious liberty, in behalf of which he appeared 
on several remarkable occasions." The men of the time 
with whom Defoe was brought into contact, were not good 
examples to him. The standard of political morality was 
probably never so low in England as during his lifetime. 
Places were dependent on the favour of the Sovereign, and 
the Sovereign's own seat on the throne was insecure ; there 
was no party cohesion to keep politicians consistent, and ev- 
ery man fought for his own hand. Defoe had been behind 
the scenes, witnessed many curious changes of service, and 
heard many authentic tales of jealousy, intrigue, and treach- 
ery. He had seen Jacobites take office under William, 
join zealously in the scramble for his favours, and enter 
into negotiations with the emissaries of James either upon 
some fancied slight, or from no other motive than a desire 
to be safe, if by any chance the sceptre should again change 
hands. Under Anne he had seen Whig turn Tory and 
Tory turn Whig, and had seen statesmen of the highest 
rank hold out one hand to Hanover and another to St. 
Germain s. The most single-minded man he had met had 
been King William himself, and of his memory he always 
spoke with the most affectionate honour. Shifty as Defoe 
was, and admirably as he used his genius for circumstantial 
invention to cover his designs, there was no other states- 
man of his generation who remained more true to the prin- 
ciples of the Revolution, and to the cause of civil and re- 
ligious freedom. No other public man saw more clearly 
what was for the good of the country, or pursued it more 



x.] HIS MYSTERIOUS END. 167 

steadily. Even when lie was the active servant of Harley, 
and turned round upon men who regarded him as their 
own, the part which he played was to pave the way for his 
patron's accession to office under the House of Hanover. 
Defoe did as much as any one man, partly by secret in- 
trigue, partly through the public press, perhaps as much as 
any ten men outside those in the immediate direction of 
affairs, to accomplish the two great objects which "William 
bequeathed to English statesmanship — the union of Eng- 
land and Scotland, and the succession to the United King- 
dom of a Protestant dynasty. Apart from the field of 
high politics, his powerful advocacy was enlisted in favour 
of almost every practicable scheme of social improvement 
that came to the front in his time. Defoe cannot be held 
up as an exemplar of moral conduct, yet if he is judged by 
the measures that he laboured for and not by the means 
that he employed, few Englishmen have lived more de- 
serving than he of their country's gratitude. He may have 
been self-seeldng and vain-glorious, but in his political life 
self-seeking and vain-glory were elevated by their alliance 
with higher and wider aims. Defoe was a wonderful mixt- 
ure of knave and patriot. Sometimes pure knave seems 
to be uppermost, sometimes pure patriot ; but the mixture 
is so complex, and the energy of the man so restless, that 
it almost passes human skill to unravel the two elements. 
The author of Robinson Crusoe, is entitled to the benefit 
of every doubt. 



THE END. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 

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The new series opens well with Mr. Leslie Stephen's sketch of Dr. John- 
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To give an intelligent idea of the Great Bear of English literary history 
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We could not wish for a more suggestive introduction to Scott and his 
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Mr. William Black has made an admirable book about Goldsmith. * * * 
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The wandering minstrel of English literature is fitly painted by the 
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SCHWEINFURTH'S HEART OF AFRICA. The Heart of Africa. 
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M'CLINTOCK & STRONG'S CYCLOPEDIA. Cyclopaedia of Bib- " 
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MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM: Lectures Delivered at 
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MOSHEIM'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, Ancient and Modern ; 
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phon. — Homer's Iliad. — Homer's Odyssey. — Herodotus. — De- 
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BAKER'S ISMAILIA. Ismailia : a Narrative of the Expedition to Cen- 
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VINCENT'S LAND OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT. The Land of 
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SHAKSPEARE. The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare. With 
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SMILES'S HUGUENOTS AFTER THE REVOCATION. The Hu- 
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SMILES'S LIFE OF THE STEPHENSONS. The Life of George 
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SQUIER'S PERU. Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the 
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BOURNE'S LIFE OF JOHN LOCKE. The Life of John Locke. By 
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ALISON'S HISTORY OF EUROPE. First Series : From the Com- 
mencement of the French Revolution, in 1789, to the Restoration of 
the Bourbons in 1815. [In addition to the Notes on Chapter LXXVI., 
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the Accession of Louis Napoleon, in 1852. 8 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $16 00; 
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WALLACE'S GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS. 

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WALLACE'S MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. The Malay Archipelago : 
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Russel Wallace. With Ten Maps and Fifty-one Elegant Illustra- 
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BLUNT'S BEDOUIN TRIBES OF THE EUPHRATES. Bedouin 
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GRIFFIS'S JAPAN. The Mikado's Empire : Book I. History of Japan, 
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THOMPSON'S PAPACY AND THE CIVIL POWER. The Papacy 
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CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT. History of Friedrich II. , 

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THE REVISION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE NEW 
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Revised. 196 pp. 

II. ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW TES- 
TAMENT in Connection with some Recent Proposals for its 
Revision. By Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., Arch- 
bishop of Dublin. 194 pp. 

III. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE REVISION OF THE EN- 
GLISH VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By C. 
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ADDISON'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Joseph Addison, 
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ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. The Annual 
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BROUGHAM'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Life and Times of Henry, Lord 
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BULWER'S HORACE. The Odes and Epodes of Horace. A Metrical 
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BULWER'S KING ARTHUR. King Arthur. A Poem. By Lord 
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DAVIS'S CARTHAGE. Carthage and her Remains : being an Account 
of the Excavations and Researches on the Site of the Phoenician Me- 
tropolis in Africa and other Adjacent Places. Conducted under the 
Auspices of Her Majesty's Government. By Dr. N. Davis, F.R.G.S. 
Profusely Illustrated with Maps, Woodcuts, Chromo-Lithographs, &c. 
8vo, Cloth, $4 00 ; Half Calf, $6 25. 



Valuable and Interesting Works for Public and Private Libraries. 9 

CAMERON'S ACROSS AFRICA. Across Africa. By Verney Lov- 
ett Cameron, C.B., D.C.L., Commander Royal Navy, Gold Medal- 
ist Royal Geographical Society, &c. With a Map and Numerous Illus- 
trations. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00. . 

CARLYLE'S FRENCH REVOLUTION. The French Revolution : a 
History. Bv Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50; Sheep, 
$4 30 ; Half Calf, $7 00. 

CARLYLE'S OLIVER CROMWELL. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and 
Speeches, including the Supplement to the First Edition. With Eluci- 
dations. Bv Thomas Carlyle. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50; Sheep, 
$± 30 ; Half Calf, $7 00. 

BARTH'S NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA. Travels and Dis- 
coveries in North and. Central Africa : being a Journal of an Expedi- 
tion undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the 
Years 1819-1855. By Henry Barth, Ph.D., D.C.L. Illustrated. 
3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $12 00; Sheep, $13 50 ; Half Calf, $18 75. 

THOMSON'S LAND AND BOOK. The Land and the Book ; or, 
Biblical Illustrations drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes 
and the Scenery, of the Holy Land. By W. M. Thomson, D.D., Twen- 
ty-five Years a Missionary of the A.B.C.F.M. in Syria and Palestine. 
With two elaborate Maps of Palestine, an accurate Plan of Jerusalem, 
and several hundred Engravings, representing the Scenery, Topogra- 
phy, and Productions of the Holy Land, and the Costumes, Manners, 
and Habits of the People. 2 vols"., 12mo, Cloth, $5 00 ; Sheep, $6 00 ; 
Half Calf, $8 50. 

TENNYSON'S COMPLETE POEMS. The Poetical Works of Alfred 
Tennyson, Poet Laureate. With numerous Illustrations by Eminent 
Artists, and Three Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, Paper, $1 00 ; Cloth, 
$1 50. 

CRUISE OF THE "CHALLENGER." Voyages over many Seas, 
Scenes in many Lands. By W. J. J. Spry, R.N. With Map and Il- 
lustrations. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 00. 

DU CHAILLU'S AFRICA. Explorations and Adventures in Equa- 
torial Africa : with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the Peo- 
ple, and of the Chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, 
Hippopotamus, and other Animals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. Illus- 
trated. Svo, Cloth, $5 00 ; Sheep, $5 50 ; Half Calf, $7 25. 

DU CHAILLU'S ASHANGO LAND. A Journey to Ashango Land, 
and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. By Paul B. Du 
Chaillu. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00; Sheep, $5*50; Half Calf, 
$7 25. 

WHITE'S MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. The Massacre 

of St. Bartholomew : Preceded by a History of the Religious Wars in 
the Reign of Charles IX. By Henry White, M.A. With Illustra- 
tions. . Crown 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. 



io Valuable and Interesting Works for Public and P?'ivate Libraries. 

DRAPER'S CIVIL WAR. History of the American Civil War. By 
John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, Beveled Edges, 
$10 50; Sheep, $12 00; Half Calf, $17 25. 

DRAPER'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE. A 

History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. By John W. 
Draper, M.D., LL.D. New Edition, Revised. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, 
$3 00 ; Half Calf, $6 50. 

DRAPER'S AMERICAN CIVIL POLICY. Thoughts on the Future 
Civil Policy of America. By John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D., Pro- 
fessor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. 
Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 00; Half Morocco, $3 75. 

WOOD'S HOMES WITHOUT HANDS. Homes Without Hands: 
being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, classed according to 
their Principle of Construction. By J. G. Wood, M.A., F.L.S. Il- 
lustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $1 50 ; Sheep or Roan, $5 00 ; Half Calf, $6 75. 

ELAMMARION'S ATMOSPHERE. The Atmosphere. Translated 
from the French of Camille Feammarion. Edited by James Glai- 
sher, F.R.S., Superintendent of the Magnetical and Meteorological 
Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. With 10 Chromo- 
Lithographs and 86 Woodcuts. 8vo, Cloth, $6 00 ; Half Calf, $8 25. 

ABBOTT'S DICTIONARY OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE. A 

Dictionary of Religious Knowledge, for Popular and Professional Use ; 
comprising full Information on Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical 
Subjects. With nearly One Thousand Maps and Illustrations. Ed- 
ited by the Rev. Lyman Abbott, with the Co-operation of the Rev. 
T. C. Conant, D.D. Royal 8vo, containing over 1000 pages, Cloth, 
$6 00; Sheep, $7 00 ; Half Morocco, $8 50. 

ABBOTT'S FREDERICK THE GREAT. The History of Frederick 
the Second, called Frederick the Great. Bv John S. C. Abbott. Il- 
lustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00 ; Half Calf, $7 25. 

ABBOTT'S HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. The 

French. Revolution of 1789, as viewed in the Light of Republican Insti- 
tutions. Bv John S. C. Abbott. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00 ; 
Sheep, $5 50 ; Half Calf, $7 25. 

ABBOTT'S NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. The History of Napoleon 
Bonaparte. By John S. C. Abbott. With Maps, Illustrations, and 
Portraits on Steel. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $10 00; Sheep, $11 00; Half 
Calf, $14 50. 

ABBOTT'S NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA. Napoleon at St. Hele- 
na : or, Interesting Anecdotes and Remarkable Conversations of the 
Emperor during the Five and a Half Years of his Captivity. Collected 
from the Memorials of Las Casas, O'Meara, Montholon, Antommarchi, 
and others. By John S. C. Abbott. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00 ; 
Sheep, $5 50 ; Half Calf, $7 25. 



Valuable and Interesting Works for Public and Private Libraries. 1 1 

SCHAFFS CREEDS OF CHRISTENDOM. Bibliotheca Symbolica 
Ecclesiae Universalis. The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and 
Critical Notes. By Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Bibli- 
cal Literature in the Union Theological Seminary, New York. 3 vols. 
Vol. I. : The History of Creeds. Vol. II. : The Greek and Latin 
Creeds, with Translations. Vol. III. : The Evangelical Protestant 
Creeds, with Translations. 8vo, Cloth, $15 00. 

YONGE'S LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE. The Life of Marie 
Antoinette, Queen of France. By Charles Duke Yoxge, Regius 
Professor of Modern History and English Literature in Queen's Col- 
lege, Belfast. With Portrait. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The Poets of the 
Nineteenth Century. Selected and Edited by the Rev. Robert Aris 
Willmott. With English and American Additions, arranged by Evert 
A. Duyckinck, Editor of ' ' Cyclopaedia of American Literature. " Com- 
prising Selections from the Greatest Authors of the Age. Superbly Il- 
lustrated with 141 Engravings from Designs by the most Eminent Art- 
ists. In Elegant small 4to form, printed on Superfine Tinted Paper, 
richly bound in extra Cloth, Beveled, Gilt Edges, $5 00 ; Half Calf, 
$5 50 ; Full Turkey Morocco, $9 00. 

COLERIDGE'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Complete Works of Sam- 
uel Taylor Coleridge. With an Introductory Essay upon his Philosoph- 
ical and Theological Opinions. Edited by the Rev. W. G. T. Shedd, 
D.D. With a Portrait, 7 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $10 50; Half Calf, 

$22 75. 

COLERIDGE'S (Sara) MEMOIR AND LETTERS. Memoir and Let- 
ters of Sara Coleridge. Edited by her Daughter. With Two Portraits 
on Steel. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2*50; Half Calf, $4 25. 

TYERMAN'S WESLEY. The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wes- 
lev, M.A., Founder of the Methodists. Bv the Rev. Luke Tyerman. 
With Portraits. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $7 50 ; Half Calf, $14 25. 

TYERMAN'S OXFORD METHODISTS. The Oxford Methodists : 
Memoirs of the Rev. Messrs. Clayton, Ingham, Gambold, Hervey, and 
Broughton, with Biographical Notices of others. By the Rev. L. Tyer- 
man. With Portraits. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

VAMB^RY'S CENTRAL ASIA. Travels in Central Asia. Being 
the Account of a Journey from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert, 
on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian, to Khiva, Bokhara, and Samar- 
cand, performed in the Year 1863.. By Arminids Vambery, Member 
of the Hungarian Academy of Pesth, by whom he was sent on this Sci- 
entific Mission. With Map and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4 50 ; Half 
Calf, $6 75. 

LYMAN BEECHER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, &c. Autobiography, 
Correspondence, &c, of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by his Son, 
Charles Beecher. With Three Steel Portraits, and Engravings on 
Wood. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5 00; Half Morocco, $8 50. 



12 Valuable and Interesting Works for Public and Private Libraries. 

THE DESERT OF THE EXODUS. Journeys on Foot in the Wil- 
derness of the Forty Years' Wanderings ; undertaken in connection 
with the Ordnance Survey of Sinai and the Palestine Exploration Fund. 
By E. H. Palmer, M.A., Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic, and 
Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. With Maps and numerous 
Illustrations from Photographs and Drawings taken on the spot by the 
Sinai Survey Expedition and C. F. Tvrwhitt Drake. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 
$3 00. 

DRAKE'S NOOKS AND CORNERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND 
COAST. Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast. By Sam- 
uel Adams Drake, Author of "Old Landmarks of Boston," "His- 
toric Fields and Mansions of Middlesex, "&c. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, 
$3 50 ; Half Calf, $5 75. 

BENJAMIN'S CONTEMPORARY ART. Contemporary Art in En- 
rope. By S. G. W. Benjamin. Handsomely Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, 
Gilt Edges, $3 50. 

THOMSON'S MALACCA, INDO-CHINA, AND CHINA. The Straits 
of Malacca, Indo-China, and China; or, Ten Years' Travels, Advent- 
ures, and Residence Abroad. By J. Thomson, F.R.G.S. With over 
60 Illustrations from the Author's own Photographs and Sketches. 8vo, 
Cloth, $1 00. 

TREVELYAN'S SELECTIONS FROM MACAULAY. Selections 
from the Writings of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, G. Otto Tre- 
velyan, M.P. for Hawick District of Burghs. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. 

PRIME'S POTTERY AND PORCELAIN. Pottery and Porcelain of 
all Times and Nations. With Tables of Factory and Artists' Marks, 
for the Use of Collectors. By William C. Prime, LL.D. Illustrated, 
8vo, Ornamental Cover, Cloth, $7 00. (In a box.) 

DRAPER'S SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS. Scientific Memoirs; being Ex- 
perimental Contributions to a Knowledge of Radiant Energy. Bv John 
William Draper, M.D., LL.D. With a Portrait. 8vo, Cloth,"$3 00. 

YOUNG'S CERAMIC ART. The Ceramic Art. A Compendium of 
the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. By Jennie J. 
Young. With 464 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00. 

CRABB'S ENGLISH SYNONYMES. English Synonymes Explained 
in Alphabetical Order. With Copious Illustrations and Examples 
drawn from the Best Writers. To which is now added an Index to 
the Words. By George Crabb, A.M. New Edition, with Additions 
and Corrections. 12mo, 856 pages, Cloth, $2 50. 

BARTLETT'S EGYPT TO PALESTINE. From Egypt to Pales- 
tine : Through Sinai, the Wilderness, and the South Country. Obser- 
vations of a Journey made with Special Reference to the History of the 
Israelites. By S. C. Bartlett, D.D., LL.D., President of Dartmouth 
College, and lately Professor in the Chicago Theological Seminary. 
With Maps and Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth. (In Press.) 



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